Bold, colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a horned mask with stippled orange and yellow eyes, on the forearm.

Colourful horned mask on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large mask design with two yellow horns, stippled dotwork eyes, a dotted nose and green and teal triangular spikes fills the forearm. Thick black outlines define the shapes, with flat areas of red, orange, purple and yellow inside. The design is centred and fills most of the frame against a plain, pale skin background.

Dotwork Neo-trad Forearm Mask Horn Eye Spike

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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 net came up heavy on the morning tide, and Ruth swore at it the way she swore at all weather. Tangled in the orange twine was a painted mask no bigger than a dinner plate, its two yellow horns snapped short at the tips, its eyes stippled with so many tiny dots that they seemed to shift whenever the sun caught them. She carried it up the hundred and twelve steps to the lamp room without deciding to.

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Her brother Owen had painted things that bright. He had been dead since the winter the Marigold went down off the Scarrow reef, and nobody in Mull Bay had said his name in her hearing since. She set the mask on the iron rail where the beam swept past every twelve seconds, and for three nights she logged the wind and the visibility and did not look at it straight.

On the fourth night the fog came in thick as wet wool, and the horn groaned every half minute while she hunted the glass for a light that wasn't there. The mask caught the lamp each time it turned, and each time it seemed to ask her the same question. Halfway through the watch she counted the dots on its nose, one, two, three, all the way to nine, and her throat closed, because the Marigold had carried nine men.

At dawn she took a pencil from the drawer and wrote their names on the back of the mask, one under another, in her careful schoolroom hand. Then she hung it back on the rail, so that every sweep of the light would find them.