Two colour tattoos in a neo-traditional style: a forearm portrait of a moustached man with lightning bolts and lettering, and an upper arm portrait of a bearded man in a paper boat hat with an eye and

Two colourful portrait tattoos on forearm and upper arm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two separate tattoos are shown side by side. The forearm piece shows a moustached man's face in orange, yellow and pink with a pink sun, three lightning bolts and two lines of lettering beneath it. The upper arm piece shows a bearded man in a folded paper boat hat within a circular frame, with a red-rimmed eye, an anchor, red and black drips and bold striped shading behind him.

Neo-trad Forearm Upper arm Portrait Man Face Lightning Sun Lettering Eye Anchor Paper boat Drip Stripe

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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

Alf Penrose was still on the quay when the squall came over the breakwater, a sheet of the Cornishman folded in his fists. He had bet Dickie Trevail a bottle of ginger beer that a paper boat could sail past the harbour wall, and the wager had seemed sound until the first rain came slanting off the bay and turned the grey water into a chequerboard of white and black.

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Dickie ran for the lifeboat shed. Alf stayed, because the boat was nearly finished and because Mrs Hosken from the chandlery had come out with her umbrella inside out, shouting that the red lamp on the pier had blown dark. He saw the lightning first, three quick forks down past Godrevy, then a dull red sun burning through the cloud over the estuary mouth. In the lull the bay lay flat as a spilled page of ink.

The boat went out on the ebb. Alf watched it turn once, its folded prow catching the last light, then slip past the wall and into the chop. He had pencilled a small eye on the bow, the way his grandfather had painted eyes on the smacks to keep them watching for boys who went out too far. Nobody called it foolish. Mrs Hosken said nothing at all, only rolled down her umbrella and went back inside.

When the sea went calm the next morning the boat was sitting on the sand at Hayle Point, dry and whole, with a stripe of tar along its keel. Dickie paid up with the ginger beer that afternoon. Alf never opened it. He kept it on the windowsill of the shed, where the sun came through the glass and threw a red coin across the floor.