Man wearing a grey top with full colour traditional tattoo sleeves on both arms and lettering across the hands, including the words Fate and Always.

Full colour traditional sleeves and hands

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a man's arms and hands covered in bold traditional tattoos, with a pin-up style figure and flowers on the upper arms and script lettering across the hands. The linework is solid and outlined, with shading built up in layers of red, orange, blue, green and yellow. The arms are held forward against a plain grey top and a tiled floor, with the hands framing the centre of the composition.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Forearm Hand Pin-up Script Star Flower Lettering Banner Rose

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

Ruth Adair had three days to repaint the sign over the coin-tables on Saltcombe pier, and the only letters she could still make straight were the ones she did in red lake on the back of her own hand. Her father had taught her to pounce a stencil, to thin enamel with turpentine until it ran like weak tea, and never to hurry a word that would be read from the water. The booth belonged to Morrow, who owned the rides and half the debts along the front, and he wanted FATE in gold scroll across the top, then ALWAYS, then WINNER, all ringed in stars the colour of boiled sweets.

Keep reading

He did not ask for the girl on the side panel, but Ruth painted her anyway, after the lamps went out and the gulls had stopped complaining. The pin-up had her mother's chin and a rose pinned behind one ear, and she sat in a nest of poppies with a banner curling out from under her like a ribbon on a birthday cake. Her mother had sold the original stencil to a sailor in 1961 to cover a debt nobody on the quay would name, and Ruth had spent twenty years trying to get the flowers right from memory.

Morrow came down on the Friday with his hat in his hand and his cigar unlit. He stood a long time in front of the girl. Then he took a shilling from his waistcoat, looked at its date, and set it on the paint tin without a word. Ruth picked it up. It was warm from his pocket and she knew he meant it as payment, and that it was also an apology he would never make aloud.

She wiped her brush, put the lid on the lake, and kept the shilling. The girl was still wet when the tide came in and the first punters began to wander down the boards, reading the words over their shoulders as though they might bet on them.