Upper arm tattoo of a city skyline with tall buildings, a tram and a full moon, shaded in black ink with pale teal watercolour washes and drips.

City skyline and tram on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shows a city skyline with tall buildings, a tram on its tracks and a large pale moon. Bold black linework and dense hatching define the architecture, while loose teal and cream washes and dripping black ink run down the lower part of the design. The composition fills the arm from shoulder to elbow, with the tram anchoring the lower half.

Upper arm City Skyline Skyscraper Building Moon Splatter Drip Watercolour

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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

The last tram of the night came down Carrow Hill with its lamps lit and nobody aboard but Ada Penhallow and a man asleep under a newspaper in the back seat. She had driven the 9 for eleven years and knew the sound each wheel made on the points at Lister Street, a short knock like someone asking to be let in.

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Rain had come and gone while the city was at its supper. The streets shone black, and the tower blocks of the old town stood in the wet as if they had been drawn with a wide pen and left to dry on the page. Above them the moon hung pale and lopsided, the colour of a cracked plate. Ada had stopped looking at it years ago. Tonight it kept catching her eye in the mirror.

At the bottom of the hill the rails ran straight across the flooded square. The tram slid onto the reflection, and for a moment there were two cities under her wheels, one above and one below, with the tram sitting in the middle of both like a bead on a string. Ada eased the brake off and listened to the water dripping from the roof onto the glass. She thought of her father, who had worked this same route before the war and once told her the city was only a ledger of who had got home.

The depot would want her in by midnight. She took the long way instead, past the dark cinema and the chapel with its cracked clock, and let the tram crawl through the wash of light until the man in the back woke, looked out and said nothing at all. Ada pulled the lever to open the doors on the empty stop and watched the ink run down the windows, slow and black, as if the whole town were finally letting go of the day.