Three flat cloud shapes in white, blue and grey on the upper arm of a person wearing a checked shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three cloud shapes on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Three simple cloud shapes sit in a vertical column on the outer upper arm, with one white, one blue and one grey. Each cloud is a solid flat fill with no shading or linework, and the glossy finish suggests a temporary tattoo. A hand grips the sleeve at the top of the frame against a plain grey background.

Upper arm Cloud Temporary tattoo Icon

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

Mr Dunmore wants the sign repainted before the Whitsun fair, so you climb the ladder outside the Crown Street chemist with a tin of primer under one arm and a rag in your back pocket. The sign is the same as it ever was: a painted barometer, a little brass needle, and above it three clouds the size of dinner plates that the weather has rubbed to ghosts. White for fair, blue for showers, grey for the kind of rain that keeps the mill girls indoors. Nobody in Ashby Fold has looked at those clouds in years, though everybody checks them before they leave the house.

Keep reading

The needle sticks at Change. Mrs Ormerod from the post office stops below with her basket and asks what you think you're doing up there, and you tell her the clouds need colour. She says clouds don't need anything, they come and go as they please. You don't argue. You mix the blue a shade lighter than the tin because you remember it lighter, from the summer your father lifted you onto his shoulders to see the Pennine skyline.

You work until the light goes flat. The white goes on first, then the blue, then the grey, each one a flat stamp with no shadow, the way you were taught at the art school in Bolton before the money ran out. When you climb down, the three shapes sit in their column like a family waiting for a photograph. Mrs Ormerod has gone home. A van with a crooked aerial pulls up outside and the driver leans out to ask if the chemist is still open.

He doesn't look at the sign. You do, and as you pack the tins away the brass needle creaks round on its own, past Fair, past Showers, and settles on the grey.