Forearm covered in a colourful sleeve tattoo with a paw print, LEGO minifigure, maple leaf, snowflake and puzzle pieces, shown in a close photo.

Colourful forearm sleeve with LEGO and paw print

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm is covered in a multicoloured tattoo sleeve made of separate panels. The motifs include a black paw print, a yellow LEGO minifigure face, a maple leaf, a snowflake, a star, a red heart, jigsaw puzzle pieces and a banner reading festina lente. The linework is bold and the colour is dense, with blue, green, red, orange and yellow filling most of the panels.

Forearm Paw print Maple leaf Snowflake Star Heart Puzzle piece Banner Lettering Sleeve

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

Dear Ruth,

Keep reading

The box came on the morning of the first hard frost, soaked at one corner where the van had left it on the step. Your father's handwriting was on the lid: Festina lente, and underneath it, Don't rush the sky. I laughed out loud, which startled Biscuit, the old spaniel, who has never once been rushed in her life and has no intention of starting now.

Inside were three hundred pieces of a harbour, a lighthouse with a crooked door, and a little yellow-faced figure with a moustache you drew on in marker when you were nine. I set everything out across the kitchen table in the order he would have wanted: edges first, then the water, then the snow, which he always did last, shaking salt from a jar onto the windowsill for the sparrows.

It took me eleven weeks. I did it slowly, as instructed. Some evenings the lighthouse would not fit, so I left it, took Biscuit along the cold towpath, and came home to find the crooked door had decided to sit straight on its own. I think he would have liked that. He never believed in forcing anything.

When the last piece went in, a grey-blue fragment that had been hiding under the radiator, I sat back and saw the whole harbour lit by the window. There was a paw print pressed into the frost on the path that I had not put there. Biscuit had been out on the step all along. Come home at Easter and bring the glue. We will finish the roof together, and you can tell me how fast you think you can go.