Colour traditional style tattoo of a TARDIS and a Dalek with red roses and a banner reading Remember, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

TARDIS and Dalek with roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The image is a side-by-side pair of photographs of the same forearm tattoo from two angles. It shows a blue TARDIS on one side and a copper-coloured Dalek on the other, with red and pink roses behind them and a white banner across the middle. The bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills are typical of traditional tattooing, and the colours are vivid against the skin.

Traditional Forearm Tardis Dalek Rose Banner

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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

You arrive at the fair the week the big wheel is switched off for good, and the generator man tells you the blue box has been parked behind the candyfloss since Tuesday. Nobody on the crew will say who owns it. Beside it stands a copper machine all rivets and plunger arms, the prize for knocking down three tins with a wooden ball, and when the wind turns it hums low in its throat.

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Your grandmother ran the rose stall for thirty summers, selling one red bloom in cellophane for a shilling. She once told you every fair keeps one thing it will not sell. You ask the generator man what this one is. He shrugs, drags a faded banner out of a crate, and shows you the curling white letters: REMEMBER. He says the operators repaint it every spring because the sea wind eats the paint off the coast.

That night you climb the wooden step of the box, which is cold and smells of brass polish, and the door opens onto a room far larger than the canvas should allow. Shelves of tins line the walls. A row of paper roses hangs from the ceiling. On the bench sits a photograph of your grandmother at nineteen, laughing at someone just out of frame. The copper machine rolls to the threshold and stops, its eyestalk turning toward you with a dry click, and it waits.

You read the banner aloud. Along the midway the lights come on one by one, and when you look back the photograph is no longer on the bench but warm in your coat pocket, a single red rose pressed flat against it. Somewhere behind the candyfloss the three tins come down with a clatter, and the whole fair folds itself up around you like a letter.