Overhead view of two colour-tattooed arms, one typing on a laptop and the other writing in a notebook, with sleeve tattoos on the forearms.

Tattooed arms working at a laptop

Forearm · Colour · Photo

An overhead shot of a wooden desk where a person with colourful tattoo sleeves types on a silver laptop and writes with a pencil in a notebook. The tattoos cover the forearms and hands in detailed, multi-coloured designs with reds, greens and blues. Papers, a smartphone, a coffee cup, a notebook and a chocolate wrapper are arranged around the hands.

Forearm Hand Pencil Coffee Sleeve

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 third tape had the same hiss at the forty-second mark, like someone breathing through a closed door. Marion had typed the first two transcriptions without thinking, the way you hum a song you have heard too often. Now the coffee beside the laptop had gone cold and skinned over, and the pencil she used for corrections had worn to a stub she kept meaning to sharpen.

Keep reading

The recording belonged to a lighthouse keeper's widow from Cromarty, captured in 2041 by a council project that paid by the hour and didn't care what anyone said. The woman talked about her husband's logbook, and how the light had gone dark one night in March, though the logbook recorded it as burning. Marion copied every word exactly, as the contract demanded, and in the margin of her notebook she wrote a single question mark, then crossed it out.

On the screen the waveform climbed and fell. At the sixty-first second the widow said, quite clearly, "Tell the girl at the desk the sea is patient." Marion stopped the playback. Her phone buzzed against the wooden desk with a message from the supervisor asking for the batch by five. She looked at the printed pages stacked beside her, other people's afternoons in neat columns, and then back at the empty margin.

She typed the sentence in full and sent the batch with a note: one line unclear, please listen yourself. Across the water the ferry horn sounded, the same long note it had given every evening since the lighthouse went dark. Marion picked up the cold coffee and drank it anyway.