Colour tattoo of a vintage camera with a pop-up flash unit on the forearm, shaded in teal and black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage camera with flash on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A vintage-style camera with a raised flash unit is tattooed on the inner forearm. The body and lens are shaded in black and grey with dark tonal areas, while the top of the camera and the flash are filled with teal blue. The design is centred on the arm against plain skin and a soft green-toned background.

Forearm Camera Lens

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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 landlady at Sandholme House wants the attic cleared before the August lets, and she hands you the box with the flat of her hand, as if it might bite. Inside, under a fold of yellowed Radio Times, sits a box-shaped camera with a flash bar folded up on its shoulder like a raised eyebrow. The teal paint has worn grey where a thumb rubbed it for forty years, and the film window still carries a faint curl of tape.

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You carry it down to the front room and wind the knob, which turns with a dry click and then stops, as if the film inside has been waiting for permission. The chemist on Marine Parade has a counter that smells of vinegar and peppermint, and the lad behind it says it'll take until Thursday. You walk the prom twice that week, past the whelk stall and the pier with its missing letters, and by Thursday you have half forgotten the camera at all.

The prints come back in a brown paper wallet. Most are sea wall and sky, a dog mid-shake, a man selling ice creams from a bicycle with a cracked bell. The last frame is a woman of about twenty in a polka-dot headscarf, laughing at the lens while she holds the same camera up to her own reflection in the boarding house bay window. You know the window. You know the scratch in the corner of the glass where the sea light falls.

You put the prints back in their wallet and carry the camera up to the attic, setting it on the sill where the next lodger will find it. Then you press the shutter with your thumb, just to hear the flash charge, and watch a small white bloom fill the room for nobody at all.