Black linework tattoo on an upper arm showing a city skyline, a tree, a street sign and a small creature, photographed outdoors.

City skyline and street scene on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo runs down the upper arm of a woman in a grey tank top, showing a city skyline at the top, a tree trunk, and a street sign reading partly as DUE. Lower down, a small animal-like creature and a hunched figure sit beside the tree, with a dark circular shape near the bottom of the design. The ink is black only, with fine outlines and light dotted shading, and the image is taken outdoors against foliage.

Upper arm City skyline Tree Creature Figure Building

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

The sign on Tillery Lane had hung the wrong way round since the spring the council repainted the terraces, and the letters that remained read only DUE, as if the street owed someone money it could no longer name. Mrs Okonedo at number nine said it would stay like that until somebody climbed the old elm and set it right. Nobody volunteered. The elm was older than the gasworks chimney, and older than the rooftops that now stacked themselves up beyond it like a row of cut teeth.

Keep reading

Bartholomew Wren was the only sign-writer left in the parish, and his back had folded over years of ladders until he walked like a question. He went up the trunk one Tuesday with a pot of lamp-black on a cord around his neck and a brush behind his ear. A thin red fox that nobody had ever seen eat followed him up the bark, claws ticking, and settled into the fork of the branches as if it had been paid to watch.

Halfway up, Wren stopped to rest and looked down. The street lay under him like a drawing somebody had abandoned, the drain at the kerb a dark round eye with nothing in it but rain. He thought of every name he had painted and every one he had scraped away. When he finally reached the sign he did not paint anything new. He simply turned the board on its bracket, and the fox, which had apparently been waiting all afternoon, dropped the empty pot into the drain with a satisfied little cough.

By evening the sign read DUE, and nobody in Tillery Lane could say whether the debt was owed to the tree or by it.