Colourful rainbow paint splash tattoo with black Born This Way lettering and an equals sign on an upper arm, in a painterly style.

Rainbow paint splash with Born This Way on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A rainbow paint splash sits on the outer upper arm, with black handwritten lettering reading Born This Way across the centre and a black equals sign above it. The splash has soft, watercolour-like edges with red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple running through it, and fine drips and speckles spread outwards. The arm is photographed outdoors against trees and parked cars, with a yellow hi-vis sleeve in the foreground.

Lettering Upper arm Rainbow Paint splash Lettering Drip

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 lid came off in my hands on the third Tuesday of June, and the red went up the ladder rungs like something alive. Mrs Pargeter from the post office stood underneath me with a tea towel over her arm, looked at the mess and then at the half-lettered board on the trestles, and said, 'Well, you'll have to start again now, won't you.'

Keep reading

I had been asked to paint the sign for the village hall, the one that hangs over the double doors where the lane runs out at the edge of the wood and the oaks begin. The committee had argued for a fortnight about the lettering and settled on something plain. I had my own idea. I kept it to myself and mixed the colours on an old palette, orange sliding into yellow, blue into green, until the splash looked as if someone had flung it at the board in a hurry. Across the middle I was to put two words in black capitals, BORN THIS WAY, with a short black bar above them for the equals sign, the way a child draws a sum.

The wind came over the trees that evening and the drips ran before the varnish had a chance to take. Mrs Pargeter stood in the lane with her hands on her hips and said nothing for a long while. Then she said the words were still there, weren't they, under the runs, and she had always liked a thing you could read through.

On Saturday the fete opened and the banner went up with its speckles and its runs, and nobody asked me to fix a thing. The black letters sat in the middle of all that colour, leaning slightly, as though they were still deciding whether to stay.