A person in green scrubs with arms crossed, showing a large colourful tattoo on the forearm and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful arm tattoos with crossed arms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A person in green scrubs and white gloves stands with arms folded, a yellow stethoscope draped around the neck. The tattoos cover the forearm and upper arm and appear to be a large, densely detailed design with red, orange, green and yellow areas. Dark outlines and shading define the forms against the skin, and the framing is cropped at the torso with a plain, softly lit background.

Forearm Upper arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink was still weeping when the Marisol Vane took green water over her bow below the Horn, and I remember thinking the whole sleeve would be ruined before we raised a single port. Teodor had done it in a back room in Kobe over three nights, for passage money and a bottle of rice spirit he never offered to share. Red for the sea fire that walks the rigging in February, orange for the lantern glow along the Osaka quay, and a green serpent coiling from wrist to elbow with its eye left bare in yellow.

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Nobody aboard believed in sea serpents except the cook, who believed in anything that could be fried. The second mate, a Glasgow man called Pruitt with fingers like cold chisels, laughed when I showed him the arm and said a bad tattoo was the only thing a sailor could keep dry. Then the wind backed hard and we lost the foresail, and for two days I hauled rope with my forearm raw and bleeding through the ink, watching the serpent's scales go dark and bright with every spray.

On the third night the sea went flat and silver, and a pale shape rose beside the hull, long as a mainmast, its back studded with the same yellow eye. Pruitt swore he saw nothing. I didn't argue. I only lifted my arm to the moon and felt the serpent tighten its coil, the way a sleeper does when someone calls their name.

We made Liverpool in April with the sleeve scabbed and the rigging half new. Pruitt was first down the gangway, and at the customs shed he stopped me and asked, quietly, what the green thing was meant to be. I told him it was a keeper, and that it had come home with me, which was more than the foresail had managed.