Full-colour tattoo on a forearm showing a blue caterpillar, a figure in a red coat and bow tie, a white flower and gold keys among green vines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon caterpillar and wonderland scene on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo of a cartoon scene with a blue caterpillar at the centre, a character in a red coat and bow tie at the top left, and a white flower with a golden centre on the right. Gold keys, swirling green vines and purple and red shapes fill the lower part of the design. The shading is smooth and painterly with strong blues, greens and purples, and the scene wraps around the arm.

Forearm Character Flower Key Vine Mushroom Cartoon Smoke

Find an artist for this

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

Nell had counted the keys three times before the ferry docked, and still there were only four, each the length of a finger and gone green at the teeth. The crate had come over on the Tuesday boat, marked FRAGILE in someone's careful capitals, and nobody on Carrick had ordered anything. Her uncle swore it was the caterpillar's doing. Every fortnight, he said, the blue one in the bracken above the harbour asked for a parcel, and every fortnight the island sent one back.

Keep reading

The caterpillar lay coiled over the rocks like a wet sock dropped by a giant, a brass pipe smoking at one end and its eyes narrowed at the other. It studied Nell with the patience of something that had outlived three hundred summers and found most of them tedious. "Four," it said, when she held the keys up to the light. "Good. The lighthouse door wants two, the gate at the bottom of the sea wants one, and the last one is for you to lose."

She did not lose it. She carried it through the wet fields, past white daisies that opened only when someone was telling the truth, and past a red-coated man in a bow tie who tipped his hat and then, rather rudely, informed her the tide was going out. By evening the keys had turned warm in her palm, and the green vines around the lighthouse door had started to unwind themselves like sleepy cats.

At the top of the tower the wind was loud. She fitted the first key, then the second, and the door swung open on a sky full of stars and a mushroom the size of a rowing boat, where her uncle sat with his boots dangling, pretending he had not been waiting. Nell took out the last key, kissed its cold green teeth, and dropped it into the dark. Below, far down, something blue and patient said, quite clearly, "Well done."