Abstract brush stroke tattoos in blue, teal, red and orange with black dots, across the shoulders, upper arms and upper chest of a person in a black bandeau top.

Painterly brush stroke tattoos on shoulders

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The image is a three-view collage of a person's upper body, with the face cropped out at the top. Loose, painterly brush strokes in blue, teal, red and orange, interspersed with black dots and dotted trails, run across the collarbone, shoulders and upper arms. The strokes look like painted marks, with varied opacity and some overlapping, and the colour ink dominates the composition.

Shoulder Upper arm Chest Brush stroke Abstract Dot Dotted line

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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 road out of Marl Junction has been losing its paint since before you were born, so the council sends you out with a van, two drums of white lining and a brush you hate. Nobody asked you to make it pretty. Still, at kilometre nine the tarmac bends around a dead petrol station, and the ochre wall beside it is blank except for a cracked outline of someone's name. You pull in and sit in the cab until the heat makes the windscreen shiver.

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Then you open the box of pigments your aunt left you, the tins gone stiff with age, and you start with blue because blue is what the sky owes you. You work fast. A long teal stroke goes across the render, then a red that bleeds where you have loaded the brush too heavy, then a second blue dragged under it like a river coming up for air. Each stroke has to be finished in one go or it goes dull and dead. A brown dog watches from the shade of the pumps and does not bark.

By four the wall is covered, and the colour sits in the dust-light as though it might come off on a finger. You flick black dots off the bristles, a trail of them from the corner to the pump, the way ink spatters when the hand won't stop. A lorry passes and its wind lifts the loose edge of a stroke. You watch it flutter and do not reach for it. Let the road keep one thing it cannot repaint.