Illustration of a muscular cartoon man with a moustache and pipe, his arms, torso and legs covered in dense line-drawn tattoo designs in teal on yellow.

Cartoon figure covered in tattoo designs

Upper arm · Colour · Flash

A muscular cartoon man with a moustache and pipe stands with his arms raised, and his whole body is filled with small doodle-style tattoo designs. The designs include skulls, clouds, rain, eyes, flowers and sea creatures, drawn in fine teal linework on a flat yellow ground. The figure sits centred on a plain white background, with pink underwear as the only other colour.

Upper arm Forearm Chest Thigh Calf Ankle Moustache Pipe Skull Cloud Rain Eye Flower Fish Ship

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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

"Mind the drawers, the ink's still wet on the last one," Mrs Thackeray said, and I stepped round a stack of prints that smelled of turpentine and chip fat. Hull on a wet Thursday, the print shop lit like a ship's galley, and the big sheet hanging from the rafters was the one everybody came to gawp at: a strongman standing on a flat yellow field, arms raised, every inch of him doodled over with rain clouds, skulls, fish and tiny ships.

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The commission came from a man called Gideon Pruitt, who ran the rides at the end of the pier and wanted a poster of himself. He wanted every line by hand, he said, and he paid in pennies counted into a Players tin. Each night I sat under the lamp copying his designs onto the proof while he smoked his pipe and told me which fish was his favourite. The little cloud on his thigh had rained on him for thirty years, he claimed, and the skull over his heart was a cousin who'd gone to sea and never come back.

On the last night the rain was coming sideways off the Humber and the shop lights kept flickering. I drew the final ship on the sole of the left foot, a rowing boat with one oar, because the sheet was going to be pinned up in a window facing the water. Gideon watched me work and said nothing for a long time. Then he tapped the pipe out on the counter and asked me to draw a second oar, in case the first one got lost.

I drew it. By morning the poster had gone, and so had the tin, and on the step outside there was a single wet footprint pointing toward the river.