Collage of six red and blue outline tattoos in an offset, misregistered style, including a paper aeroplane, a ray gun, a suitcase with a palm tree, a fish skeleton and a cartoon creature, on arms and

Six red and blue linework tattoos in a collage

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

This collage shows six separate tattoos on skin, each drawn in single-line outlines that are doubled in red and blue to create an offset, three-dimensional effect. The subjects include a paper aeroplane with dashed loops, a ray gun with a coiled barrel, a suitcase decorated with a palm tree and sun, a fish skeleton, a cartoon creature and a boxy appliance with a row of round tips on top. Shading is limited to stippled dots within some shapes, and the ink is mostly red and blue on a plain background.

Forearm Upper arm Palm tree Collage

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

Dear Ruairi,

Keep reading

The Thursday boat brought the wrong post again, so your box is still in the back room of the shop where the damp can't reach it. Your mother rang twice asking me to send it on, but I told her I'd bring it over myself on the next crossing, which means you'll have to wait for me, or at least for a letter in my handwriting.

Inside the tea tin is the paper aeroplane you folded from a page of the ferry timetable the night before the storm. It still flies. I tried it off the end of the pier and it sailed out over the harbour wall, leaving those dashed loops hanging in the air behind it the way you used to draw them on chip paper. It landed in the net of Cathal's boat, and he's been asking me ever since who makes his aeroplanes now.

The suitcase with the palm tree on it is at the bottom of the wardrobe, and the ray gun sits on the windowsill where the sun can't fade it. I know you thought they were rubbish, but the lads on the dock made me promise to keep them safe. The driftwood fish skeleton is on the mantelpiece, and every morning it catches the light and throws a little blue shadow across the wallpaper that's sort of out of step with the red one.

Come home on the Thursday boat and we'll sit at the kitchen table with the red and blue glasses from the Christmas cracker and look at everything together. I'd like to see which of us has moved.

Morag