Colour tattoo of a paint tin pouring pink paint with a brush resting in a second tin, shaded in grey and black, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink paint tin spilling on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an upturned paint tin pouring bright pink paint down the arm, with a second tin in the lower area holding a paintbrush. The tins are rendered with grey and black shading and highlights that give them metal form, while the paint has soft pink shading and splashes. The design sits on a light-skinned forearm against a grey textured background.

Forearm Paintbrush Splash Pink

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 tin went over on the quay at Porthkell on a Tuesday, and nobody could say afterwards whether the gull or the new boy had knocked it. Walter Penrose watched the pink come out in one slow, thick tongue, down the granite steps and over the weed, and he did not shout, because a decorator who shouts at paint has already lost the argument with it.

Keep reading

By Friday the pink had reached the harbour mouth. The mackerel boats came in with their nets streaked, and the crab pots had turned the colour of boiled sweets. Old Mrs Tregear said the sea was only doing what it had always wanted, which was to look like a lifeboat shed on a summer postcard, and nobody laughed, because she had been right about the weather for fifty years.

Walter took his brush and his second tin down to the lowest step at the lowest tide. He dipped the bristles in the spilled colour, which had gone tacky and cool, and painted a single grey stripe across the wet stone, the way his father had taught him to mark a join. Then he sat on the bottom step with the brush across his knees and waited for the sea to come up and take the rest of it.

It did, eventually, and it carried the pink out past the breakwater in a long bright fan. By the next spring the mackerel were running again, silver with a blush of rose along their backs. Walter's brush still stands in the grey tin on the quay, its handle worn smooth. Each evening the water comes in a shade pinker than it went out.