Colour tattoo of a vintage camera with a black lens and orange ring, surrounded by green, blue and orange watercolour splashes, on a forearm.

Camera with watercolour splashes on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A vintage-style camera is drawn in sketchy black linework, with its lens shown as a black circle outlined in orange. Loose green, blue and orange watercolour washes and splashes spread behind and below the camera, with black ink drips at the lower edge. The camera sits centrally on the forearm, and a red string bracelet is visible at the wrist.

Forearm Camera Lens Watercolour splashes Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of Brylcreem and spilt cider, and I was the only one on the floor not dancing. Mr Okafor had taken me on for the winter season to photograph couples for the sixpenny frames by the cloakroom. My camera was a battered rangefinder with a lens like a dark eye ringed in brass. Whenever the band struck up a quickstep, the coloured bulbs swung across the room in green and blue and orange, and I tried to catch them before they slid off the glass.

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Near midnight Joan Harker came to the edge of the stage and asked if I would take one of her and Ray Pollard before he shipped out at dawn. I said the light was poor. She said she didn't care, she wanted the blur. So I dropped the shutter to a slow speed and let the lamps smear across them, the orange bleeding into the green, the black of Ray's suit going soft at the edges, his hand flat against her back like he was holding a door shut.

Two days later, in the darkroom, the negative came up with black streaks running down from the bottom edge, as if someone had tipped ink over the frame. I nearly binned it. Instead I printed it large, and the splashes looked deliberate, like paint flung at a canvas in a gallery in London.

Joan came for the print on Friday and paid her sixpence without counting the change. She never told me whether Ray came back. She only asked for the one where they were blurred, and when I wrapped it in brown paper she said that was how they had looked to her all along.