Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a dog's face with ornamental swirls and red and yellow flowers on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful dog face with flowers on an arm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dog's face fills the centre of the design, with an open mouth, a pink nose and amber eyes. Swirling ornamental lines and patterned shading run across the face, and red, yellow and teal flowers with leaves sit at the top and bottom. The tattoo uses bold, multicoloured ink with smooth gradients and is photographed straight on against a plain background.

Neo-trad Forearm Dog Flower Swirl Leaves

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 dog came back to the stall on the third wet Tuesday with a smear of cobalt on its nose, and Nell Garside knew then that it had been in the paint jars again. Nobody owned it. It came up Fleece Street from the river each morning, sat under the tarpaulin beside the tin plates, and waited to be fed a heel of bread by whoever was nearest.

Keep reading

Her plates were nothing grand. She painted the market's old stories on them, a heron, a canal boat, the clock tower with its hands at twelve. The dog watched her work with its head on one side. When she turned round from the rinse bucket one afternoon, a brush was lying in the wet grass of a plate she had left drying, and a dog's face was there in ochre and green, its mouth open as if it were laughing, a ring of red flowers tucked round its ears.

She sold that plate for four pounds to a man who said it was the best thing he had seen on a stall in years. Then the dog painted another, and another, each one finer than the last, with curls down its cheeks like the iron gates in the park. By the end of the month Nell had stopped asking who was doing it. She simply left the jars open and the brushes out and counted the money at dusk.

On the last wet Tuesday of the year, the dog walked off along the river with the rain running down its painted face, and it did not come back. Nell kept the one plate it had left her, the flowers still bright, and hung it on the hook by the kettle. When people asked who the artist was, she said a friend who had gone south, and that she had never once seen him hold a brush.