Cartoon collage tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo built as a collage of cartoon characters, comic-style speech lettering reading YO! RAPS, a green cube and a dotwork eye. Bold black outlines sit alongside loose red, blue, yellow and green fills and spray-like splatter. The design wraps around the arm and fills most of the frame.

Forearm Cartoon character Speech bubble Lettering Cube Eye Splatter Collage

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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

Nell had the cans rattling in her rucksack before the lock keeper's light went off on the Hollin Cut. Her cousin Dez was already up on the roof of the Mercy Jane, a narrowboat the colour of wet cardboard, shouting the first line of his verse at the water as if it owed him money.

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"Yo! Raps for the towpath, raps for the swans," he called, and a moorhen fled under the bridge.

She laughed too loudly and the laugh carried. Two bike lights swung onto the gravel. Someone's torch swept the hedge. Nell thought of the green cube her dad kept on the windowsill, the one he never finished, and of the dotted eye she used to draw on her school jotters to make the teachers nervous. She sprayed a red splat on the cabin side, then a yellow crown, then a grinning plumber with a moustache like a fallen hedgehog, because he was the only thing in her head that wouldn't get caught.

Dez's verse ended on a rhyme that didn't rhyme. The torch came closer. They went over the side into the cold brown water, laughing with their mouths full of canal, while the paint ran down the hull in long red tears.

Next morning the boat's owner stood on the towpath with a mug of tea and studied the cabin for a long time. Then he laughed out loud, left the paint exactly where it was, and went to find a bigger brush for the other side.