Colourful watercolour-style tattoo with black outlined cartoon cats and abstract splashes covering a forearm, with a person in green trousers seated beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour cartoon cats on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the arm with loose black outlines of cartoon cats and a face, filled with washes of pink, orange, yellow, blue and green. The colour is blended with soft edges and splatter-like shapes, giving a painted effect. The arm fills most of the frame, with green trousers and a chair visible behind it.

Neo-trad Forearm Cat Cartoon face Splash Watercolour

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

You are the ship's cat aboard the Marjorie Lane, a crabber out of Newlyn, and the morning the paint tins came aboard you were the only one who thought it was a present. Skipper Ned Carbis had meant to touch up the wheelhouse rail, but a swell lifted the deck and three pots slid across the wet boards, pink, orange and a blue like a bruise going green. You went after the spilled colour with great seriousness, tracking pink paw prints from the hatch to the bow and leaving a trail that bled wherever the spray found it.

Keep reading

By noon the whole deck looked like a wash-house sign. Tomas, the youngest hand, swore at you and then laughed, because every time he hosed one splash off, a new one appeared where you had sat down to lick your foot. The big cats you had drawn into the sea spray grew heads with ears and whiskers, and the men stopped calling you a nuisance and started calling you the artist. Ned said the weather would turn by evening, and it did, grey and hard from the west.

The Marjorie Lane came in last of the fleet, riding low with crab, and the harbour master counted her twice before he believed it. You sat on the top of the bow rail, soaked and unbothered, while the gulls circled the bright hull and kept their distance from the painted cats that seemed to climb the planks. On the quay, Ned looked up, shook his head and started to grin. Across the bow in orange and green, in your own muddled hand, someone had finally written the boat's name, and the crabs hauled up that night were the heaviest of the season.