Black outline tattoo of a cartoon-style figure on a forearm, with a red handwritten word on the other arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon figure tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline tattoo of a cartoon-style figure sits on the inside of a forearm, with a rounded head and a curled, rope-like body. The linework is simple and uniform with no shading, and the skin tone is the only colour in the frame. A red handwritten word is visible on the upper part of the other arm, and the photo is taken at an angle in an indoor setting.

Forearm Character Outline

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

Tomas the lamplighter worked the streets of Carrow Quay after dark, and every night he carried a coil of tarred rope over his shoulder. The old man who taught him said a lamplighter who forgets his rope will one day climb a pole he cannot come down from. Nobody in Carrow believed that, but nobody argued with the old man either.

Keep reading

One wet night in November the gas went out in every lamp along Salt Row at once, and the street sank into black. From the harbour came a knocking, slow and patient, like a knuckle tapping a barrel. Tomas took his lantern down to the water and found a round-headed thing sitting on the bollard. It was long and loose, its body wound around itself like a rope left out to dry. It had two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, and it looked at him as though he owed it money.

"You took the light," it said. "Every lamp I ever lit, you put out to feed your own."

Tomas said he had never put out a lamp in his life without trimming the wick first. The coil shifted, and out of it came a hand, then another, and they began tying knots in the air, quick as a sailor's fingers. Each knot was a street he had walked. Each one pulled tighter. So he did what the old man would have done. He threw his coil over the creature's shoulders, drew the end tight, and sang the trimming song the old man had taught him, the one with no proper words. The rope went slack and the knocking stopped. When the gas came back up Salt Row, the bollard was bare except for a black ring of tar, and the boatmen still tie their bow lines twice before dark.