Arm with a colourful cartoon sleeve tattoo on the upper arm and forearm, holding a comic-printed skateboard with orange wheels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon sleeve tattoo on an arm holding a skateboard

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bare arm covered in a sleeve of cartoon-style tattoos, including a character at the top of the upper arm, hearts, a red face-like motif and a teal and blue object lower down. The linework is bold and outlined, with flat fills and some shading, and the ink mixes red, teal, orange and black. The arm is held in front of a blurred green background while the hand grips a skateboard decorated with comic-panel artwork.

Neo-trad Upper arm Forearm Cartoon character Heart Sleeve Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had the deck pinned face-down on the trestle when the rain started, and she said we had until the ferry came in to get the panels right. I had never inked a comic before. I had only ever painted shopfront lettering on Harbour Road, gold leaf on the chemist's window, and the odd pub sign the landlord swore was mine when he was sober.

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She didn't care about that. She laid out the sheets from a stack of old comic annuals, cut into squares, and told me the trick was the black. Hold the line, she said, and don't go back over it. A cartoon lives or dies on its outline. I thought of the little bloke with the enormous fringe she'd drawn on the lid of a fish crate, how he'd grinned at me for three days before she sold the crate to a man from Crail.

By the second evening the deck was a city of boxes: a hungry shark bursting from a panel of waves, a girl in a red bobble hat shouting at a tram, a row of hearts that Mags insisted were the only honest thing on the board. The teal bottle-shaped thing she called a rocket, and I called a bottle, and we never settled it.

When the ferry finally docked, a lad in a dripping anorak came up the pier and asked if the board was for sale. Mags looked at me, and I looked at the wet paint still tacky under the lamp, and neither of us said yes. He took it anyway, tucked under his arm, and walked off along the prom with every panel facing out.