Realism tattoo on an upper arm showing a dark hat, white star-sparkled trousers and black boots against a blue smoky background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hat, sparkled trousers and boots on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a dark brimmed hat above a pair of white trousers with star-shaped sparkles, which stand over black boots with laces and buckles. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft blue and black washes behind the figure and bright white highlights on the trousers. The design fills the arm, with the boots near the lower centre and the hat at the top edge.

Realism Upper arm Hat Boot Sparkle Star Smoke

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

The customs officer at Dover wanted to know why a grown woman was driving back from Ostend with a black hat, a pair of boots and a pair of trousers so thick with sequins that they clinked when I lifted them onto his steel table. I told him the truth, which was that they had belonged to my Uncle Ferdinand, who had danced in them in the smoky halls of the Kursaal for thirty-one years and had never once been asked to declare them.

Keep reading

Uncle Ferdinand had made me promise to take them home to Margate and give them to the lad who ran the seafront picture house, because the boy had once asked him, very politely, if he could borrow them for a school play. Ferdinand died before the boy could be told, and I had decided that a promise was a promise even if it came in a suitcase that smelled of cigarettes and sea salt.

The officer turned the trousers over slowly. Under the strip light the stars on the cuffs threw tiny white spots across his knuckles and across the grey peak of his cap. He pressed a thumb against a boot buckle, then against the blue-black haze of old stage smoke still caught in the lining. He asked whether I was carrying anything else, and I said only a lifetime of other people's applause.

He laughed, a short surprised sound, and put the hat on his own head for a moment before he handed it back. Then he stamped my form without another question and walked me to the car park door. Outside, the rain had started, and the boots left wet prints on the tarmac that caught the sodium light and shone all the way to the car.