Colourful tattoo on the thigh of a grey-toned cloud with a masked face, black soot sprites, stars and a small grey creature, in a bright illustrative style.

Colourful cloud and soot sprites on a thigh

Other · Colour · Photo

A pastel cloud with a simple masked face sits at the top of the design, with rainbow-coloured drips falling beneath it. Black soot sprites with big white eyes and small stars are scattered around the cloud, and a small grey creature with a long tail hangs from the lower right. The bold black outlines and soft, gradient colour fills give the piece a bright, illustrative finish.

Other Cloud Soot sprite Star Rain Creature Rainbow

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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 sports hall smells of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and someone has hung paper lanterns from the climbing ropes so the whole room looks like the inside of a sweet shop. You arrive late with a tray of Bakewell slices and spot Dawn Pritchard beside the squash net, still wearing the grin that got you both sent to the head's office in 1998. She hugs you one-armed, tray and all, and asks whether you still draw. You say only on the backs of invoices now.

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She doesn't laugh. Instead she digs into her handbag and pulls out a folded square of lined paper, soft as cloth from years in a pocket. It is the page from your planner, the one drawn during double science, when you and she sat under the bucket Mr Abbott had set beneath the leaking roof and invented a grey cloud called Hollis who could only cry. The rule was that he rained when someone was unkind, and the drips came out in whatever felt-tips were left in the tin, which that autumn was nearly all of them. Beside him you'd scribbled soot, tiny black fluff-balls with two round eyes, that lived under the radiators and ate the dust.

"You kept this," you say. "I kept everything," Dawn says. "You told me Hollis only cried so the soot would have something to sweep up." You open your mouth to argue and realise you can't remember which of you said it first. Across the hall a teacher you both loathed is wrestling with the karaoke machine, the lanterns sway, and above the lights a few real dust motes turn slowly in the warmth. You fold the page along its old creases and tuck it into your jacket. Dawn takes the Bakewell slice you offer and says the rain was always yours to finish.