Black and grey cloud tattoo with swirled outlines and soft shading on the wrist, photographed indoors against a cluttered shelf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirl cloud tattoo on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey cloud with spiral curls along its top edge sits on the inside of a wrist. The outline is bold and dark, and the interior is filled with soft grey shading that gives the cloud some depth. The photograph is taken at an angle against a cluttered indoor background, with a dark knit sleeve visible at the bottom of the frame.

Forearm Cloud Swirl Spiral

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

Nobody comes to claim umbrellas on a dry day, which is why Mrs Pell and I were surprised when the one with the cloud tag turned up at half past four on a Tuesday in March. We keep lost property in a wire cage behind the ticket office at Thornley Road, and the tags are the only thing we write by hand: colour, make, where found. This one had been left on the 15:40 from Carlisle, and on the back of the tag someone had drawn a small grey cloud with curls along its top edge, tight as the coils on a ram's horn.

Keep reading

The man who came for it wore a waxed coat gone pale at the elbows and did not look at the umbrella so much as at the drawing. He turned the tag over twice before he spoke. His father had drawn clouds like that on everything, he said, on the backs of envelopes, on the steamed-up glass of the car, always with spirals because the wind was the only one who could write properly and clouds were just its handwriting. He had not seen the picture in twenty years. He asked whether we could keep the tag if he took the umbrella, and I said we could, though rules are rules, and he laughed and said his father would have said the same.

After he left, I sat with the tag under the lamp for a while. Mrs Pell had already gone home, and the platform clock hummed through the wall. Out past the sidings the sky was going from grey to a bruised sort of gold, and a long low cloud was unrolling over the signal gantry, its curls catching the last of the light. I pinned the tag to the board above the cage, between a child's mitten and a set of keys, where the next person could find it, and turned off the lamp.