Colour tattoo of a man sitting on the roof of a bus numbered 142, in a realistic style with a blue watercolour wash, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Man sitting on a bus with route 142

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A man sits on the roof of a bus with its route number 142 and a partly legible destination board tattooed across the side. The bus is rendered with detailed metallic shading and window reflections, while the man has softer, more painterly shading. Blue, green and grey wash surrounds the figure and bus, giving the composition a loose, atmospheric background.

Realism Forearm Man Vehicle Watercolour

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 142 had already done thirty years of school runs and Friday nights before Dacre bought it at a council auction for the price of a good horse. We painted the sides cream and gold and kept the route number because he said numbers were lucky. The destination board we left half-scraped, so it read like a promise nobody had finished keeping.

Keep reading

My uncle Teodor claimed the roof. Inside, the seats smelled of other people's cigarettes and the wage tin rattled beside the gearstick, so he sat up top every evening with a flask and his bad knee stretched out, watching the lamps of each town come on one by one as we crawled between fields. He said it was the only honest seat left in the company.

In Doncaster the big top finally gave up, a tear running the length of the canvas like a zip nobody could close. There was no money to mend it, so we set up on the car park behind the Co-op and the bus became our stage. Teodor climbed up with the drum, I took the hoop, and Dacre announced us through a megaphone that cracked on every second word. A dozen people stood in the drizzle and clapped with their coats over their heads, and nobody asked where the bus was going.

When the last act finished, Teodor stayed on the roof while we loaded the props. He was still up there when the engine started and the bus pulled out past the bus stop, the 142 glowing in the dusk. I ran after it shouting his name, and he just lifted the flask, as if we were all still going somewhere together.