Two matching origami crane tattoos in watercolour colours, one small on a wrist and one larger on a forearm with splashes of purple and blue.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching origami crane tattoos on two forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two people's arms rest side by side, each showing an origami crane tattoo. The crane on the left is small and sits near the wrist, with blue and pink tones, while the larger crane on the right has folded-paper edges and bleeding watercolour splashes in purple, blue and red. The linework is soft and the colour washes are loose, set against a plain dark background and a blue patterned shirt.

Forearm Watercolour Splash Matching tattoo

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 windfalls had started to split by the time Nell finished her cranes, so she carried them out to the orchard in her apron, each one folded from a page of their dead mother's seed catalogue. The grass was dry and smelled of cider. Her sister Rosa was up the ladder at the far end, pulling plums into a basket and singing the wrong words to a hymn.

Keep reading

"Put that one on the Bramley," Rosa called down. "The one with the split bark. Mother said that's where wishes went." Nell tied the first crane to a low branch with red thread. It hung still, then turned slowly in the wind, and where the late sun caught its folded edges it threw a spill of colour onto the trunk: violet from the plums, blue from the sky, and a red that came off the apples rotting in the long grass.

The colour kept running. By dusk the cranes had bled into the bark and the hedge and the wet earth under the trees, and the orchard looked as if someone had dipped a brush in it and walked away. Nell kept the smallest crane back. She folded its wings flat, pressed a bead of blue ink into its belly, and tied it to her sister's wrist with the last of the thread, so that whichever of them went down the lane first, the other would feel it tug.

Rosa went to the city at Michaelmas with a trunk and a borrowed coat. The Bramley dropped its fruit that autumn and nobody picked it up. Nell still walked the rows in the evenings, and each time the wind came off the hill, the crane on the far branch lifted, turned, and pointed down the lane.