Cartoon collage tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a colourful collage-style tattoo covering a forearm. It includes a cartoon character in the lower right, a Rubik's cube, a speech bubble reading YO! I'm a RAPS, and loose red and blue scribbles and splatters. Bold black outlines sit alongside stippled shading and flat fills of red, blue, green and yellow.

Forearm Cartoon character Speech bubble Lettering 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

Dez had the speech bubble first, the one that says YO! and then a bit of nonsense about being a rapper, and the rest of the arm grew around it like weeds round a bike left in the park. Nobody on the estate knew who the cartoon plumber was meant to be, and Dez never explained, just grinned and said he'd been a plumber in a previous life and the tap never stopped dripping. The Rubik's cube came in his second year, when he'd finally solved one on a bus to Brixton and the driver clapped.

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The splatter was Kwame's idea. He'd been doing spray work on the old garage doors down Coldharbour Lane for a summer, and he said every good piece needs a bit of accident in it, a red drip that looks like somebody's bad day. So they went at it with the little needle set in the back room of Lenny's flat, Lenny swearing at the telly, the cartoon man's moustache taking four goes because Dez kept moving to show off a dance move.

What nobody expected was the blue scribble near the elbow. Dez swore it was a wave from the paddling pool in Dulwich where his nan taught him to swim, and the wave came out fatter than he'd meant. He stood in front of the mirror for a long time, then laughed so hard he had to sit down on the bath. "Look at that," he said. "Even my mistakes got a bassline."