Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eleven badly judged tattoo ideas illustrated

Chest · Colour · Flash

A colourful cartoon collage of eleven imagined tattoo designs, each set in its own rounded panel with a magazine headline in the centre. The designs include text and slogans such as a PIN code, a download progress bar, a warning on underwear, a car with a Porsche banner, and Chinese characters on a back. The linework is bold and black, with flat red, blue, pink and peach fills on a cream background.

Chest Upper arm Back Thigh Other Pin Couple Heart Car Chinese character Ribbon Banner

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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

Nadia had the transfer half-pressed when the customer read his PIN aloud for the third time, slower each time, as though the digits might rearrange if he hurried. Four numbers, then the word PASSWORD in capitals, which he had already written out twice on the back of a receipt. She lifted the stencil off his skin and asked him what he planned to do when the bank changed its rules, which banks always did.

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He hadn't thought about it. Nobody ever had. That was the trouble with people who came into the shop on Kirkgate: they arrived with a plan made of plastic and a phone case, and they left with something they would have to explain at every airport for the rest of their lives. Nadia's rule was simple. If a thing needs a login, it shouldn't go on a person, and no one should need a password to read their own shoulder.

He argued, the way they all did, and then he got bored, which was how she usually won. She offered him a swallow instead, small and dark, with one wing lifted as if it had just heard its name called from across a car park. He said it was a bit twee. She said so was a PIN code, and he laughed in the way men laugh when they have been caught out by someone who was faster.

The swallow went on his forearm in twenty minutes. In March the bank did change its rules, and his card stopped working, and he came back in with a new one in his wallet and no idea what the new number was. Nadia pointed at the bird, still sharp at the edges, and told him that was the one part of him nobody would ever ask to see a code for.