Two matching watercolour-style tattoos with handwritten script reading you are my sunshine on an upper arm and my only sunshine on a forearm, with a grey floral ornament above.

Matching watercolour sunshine script on two arms

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two arms are shown, each with a watercolour-effect splash of pink, blue, yellow and green ink under handwritten black script. The upper example reads you are my sunshine, and the forearm example reads my only sunshine, with a grey floral ornament sitting above the forearm text. The colour washes are soft and blended, with fine dark speckles, and the photograph is taken in daylight against a dark background.

Upper arm Forearm Watercolour splash Script Sunshine Floral ornament

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

Sit closer and mind the fire, for this is a story about paint, and paint never sits still. On Skerrin there was a woman called Ailsa Gorrie who kept the ferry's tide book and painted the sky each evening on the backs of spoiled charts. Her husband Tam sailed the short run to the mainland, and when the weather turned he came home grey-faced and quiet.

Keep reading

One winter a fog sat on the island for nineteen days. Nobody could see the pier from the kitchen window. Ailsa ran out of white, then out of blue, so she mixed what was left in the jars: rose madder, a yellow from a tin of mustard powder, and a green that tasted of the pond. She washed it across the sky in wet, running strokes, then wrote beneath it, in her small hand, the words her mother had sung over her cradle. You are my sunshine. She wrote them again on the slate by the door, and the fog, being nosy, leaned in to read.

Tam came home on the nineteenth day, guided by the harbour bell and not by any light. He stood dripping in the doorway and read the slate, and said nothing, because the sea had taught him that words cost more than they weigh. Instead he took the brush from her hand and added a line of his own, in ink as black as a cormorant's back: my only sunshine.

She laughed so hard the jar tipped over. The green ran down the step and into the harbour, and to this day the fishermen say the water off Skerrin is greener on the mornings after a fog, as if the island is still trying to finish the sentence.