Realistic grey giraffe head and neck tattoo on the upper arm, set against blue, pink and yellow watercolour splashes.

Giraffe with watercolour splash on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A giraffe's head and long neck run down the arm, with the head near the shoulder and the neck trailing towards the elbow. The animal is shaded in black and grey with fine detail on the eyes, ears, horns and the patchy spots along the neck. Behind the head, loose watercolour washes in blue, pink, red and yellow fill the upper arm and spread across the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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Your mum says you've been asking about the giraffe at Auntie Pat's wedding, so I'll tell you properly, since I was the one roped into it. The marquee went up on the wet lawn behind the Ferris Road bowls club, and Pat had one wish: a wall that looked like the sky over the Serengeti. I'd painted shop fascias for forty years and told her a canvas sheet wasn't a wall, but she wouldn't hear it.

So I did it in watercolour, wet on wet, blue at the top, the sort of blue you get after rain clears. I ran out of the good cobalt halfway down and had to use what was in the van, a tin of cadmium red gone orange in the lid. A pink sunset bled up behind the blue because that's what the red did when it hit the water. I was about to panic when Pat's new husband, Dev, leaned over my shoulder with a pint and said it looked like the giraffe had been out in the sun all day.

Ah, the giraffe. I painted it in black and grey, working from a photo pinned on the bowls club noticeboard, and did the eyes last. Its neck ran down the marquee pole nearly to the trestle tables. Kids kept crawling under the canvas to find its spots. Near midnight, when the dancing had got rough and someone had tipped gravy across the floor, I looked up and that long face was the only thing in the tent still looking calm.

Love, Grandad

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