Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a blue police box with paint splashes in green, pink, purple and yellow, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Police box and watercolour splash on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A blue police box with the words POLICE BOX on its roof sign is the central subject, outlined in fine dark linework with some shading on its panels. Loose splashes and streaks of green, pink, purple and yellow spread across the leg around it, and thin black curved lines sit at the lower right. The photograph is taken straight on, showing the tattoo on a lower leg with the rest of the limb cropped out of frame.

Calf Police box Tardis Watercolour Paint splash Linework Clock

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 reunion was meant to be sandwiches and warm sherry in the village hall at Hollin Cross, but by eight o'clock there was a blue box in the car park that nobody had booked. It stood a little crooked on the gravel, its lamp lit above the door, and POLICE BOX ran along the roof in letters faded to the colour of weak tea. Alma Greave, who had taught them all long division, stood before it with a glass of white wine and said it had come for her husband in 1962 and had been late ever since.

Keep reading

The door opened and a man in a grey coat stepped out holding a pocket clock that ticked the wrong way. He looked along the row of them until he found Bethan Pryce, who had painted the hall mural the summer they were fifteen and then tipped every tin of watercolour into the river in a sulk. "You kept something of ours," he said. "The box runs on colour, and it has been grey for twenty-five years." Bethan went red to the ears, but she fetched a jam jar of murky water and a brush gone stiff as a bird bone from her car.

She flicked the brush at the box. Green ran down the panels, then pink, then a purple streak climbed the dark like a rocket trail, and the lamp over the door turned yellow. Where the paint struck the gravel the stones rose into a loose ring with black lines drawn across it, and the clock in the man's hand stopped, then began to turn backwards. Someone called Bethan's name, someone else laughed, and the next thing anyone knew the door had shut behind them and the box was humming.

By morning the car park was empty except for a long green streak on the hall wall and the jam jar on the step, its water gone clear. Alma said nothing about it. She only pointed at the hall clock, which read a quarter past nine and kept ticking the wrong way.