Close view of a person in a grey zip sweatshirt with black and grey tattoos on both forearms, one with a figure design and the other with a dense illustrative piece.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed forearms under a grey zip sweatshirt

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph crops the subject below the chin, showing a grey zip sweatshirt, a silver chain and a wristwatch. Both forearms carry tattoos below the sleeve cuffs: the left shows a dense design with a figurative element, and the right shows a larger illustrative piece with shading. The work appears entirely in black and grey ink against natural skin, with the arms framed centrally in the image.

Forearm Figure

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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 plates came out of the drawer wrapped in brown paper, each one heavy as a paving slab and cold as a tram rail. Mr Arkwright had cut them himself in the back room of the Lamb Street print works, forty years of copper and zinc lined up on the bench, and nobody had thought to clear them after he died. Dilys found the mask first, a grinning face shaded so finely in dots that it looked smudged even when it was sharp.

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She inked the mask plate and pulled a proof on the old Albion press, the way he used to. The paper came up grey, the lines as fine as hair. Tucked into the margin of his ledger was a single instruction: print the left side first, then turn the sheet and never line the second plate by eye. She ignored it, of course, and by the afternoon the two images had drifted apart, a woman's face with lilies gone soft at the edges where the second plate slipped.

She sat with the bad proof until the light went orange across the presses. Then she noticed the registration crosses he had punched into each corner, tiny marks nobody else would have bothered with, and understood that the mask and the lilies only made sense when the sheet was folded down the middle so the two halves met. She folded it, and the two halves fit, the grin resting against the flowers like something finally allowed to stop talking.

She pinned it above the bench, fold outwards, and left the lamp on so the ink could set. By morning the grey had dried into something that looked as though it had always been there, and the old press ticked as it cooled.