Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a police box with ink splashes and fine trailing lines on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

TARDIS with ink splashes on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A sketched police box, with the words POLICE and BOX visible on its roof sign, sits near the shoulder blade and is drawn with loose, broken linework. Soft grey and dark wash splashes spread downwards from its base, and long thin lines radiate out towards the lower right. The tattoo is in black and grey ink, and the composition is an open, diagonal arrangement across the upper back.

Back Tardis Police box Ink splash Sketch Line

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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

The lorry was waved through at Dover, which was the first wrong thing that morning, because nobody gets waved through at Dover. I was on the booth with a flask and a cough sweet when the box came up the lane behind it. There was no engine noise I could catch, only a shudder in the tarmac and a smell like struck matches. It was a police box, the old sort, painted the colour of wet slate, with POLICE BOX lettered across the top in plain white capitals that looked like a sign-writer had done them with a hangover.

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Its door opened and a woman in a waxed jacket stepped down with a clipboard. She asked for the manifest for one small room. I told her we didn't have a form for rooms. She tapped the clipboard against her palm and said the room had been on the Calais crossing since 1963 and was overdue its inspection. Dark wash ran out from under the wheels and spread across the wet concrete in soft grey clouds, and where it touched the white bay lines it left a fine spatter, as if someone had flicked a brush at the road.

I checked her papers, because checking papers is the only thing I'm sure of. The dates were written in three different hands, and one of them was mine, from a shift I haven't worked yet. Down the carriageway the cones and lamp posts ran off to the horizon in long thin lines, all of them pointing at a grey smudge of a town that wasn't on any map I'd been issued.

I stamped it cleared, because what else do you do with a thing like that. She thanked me, climbed back inside, and the box went away down the road, smaller and smaller, until it was only a blur against the lines. The cleaners never got the stain off the concrete by the booth. Some mornings I stand on it with my flask and wonder which way it was pointing when it left.