Collage of four watercolour-style tattoos: a pink and blue cat on the thigh, a rainbow splash with script on the forearm, a black tree with birds on the shoulder blade, and a colourful owl on the

Watercolour cat, tree, owl and splash tattoos

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The collage shows four separate tattoo photographs. The subjects are a cat's head on the thigh, a rainbow splash on the forearm with a handwritten line of script, a black tree with dispersing birds fading into blue and pink wash on the shoulder blade, and a detailed owl with orange and multicoloured feathers on the upper back. The cat, splash and owl use bold colour washes with dark outlines, while the tree uses solid black silhouette shading against soft colour.

Thigh Forearm Back Shoulder Cat Owl Tree Bird Splash Script Watercolour Collage

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

Nell had been mixing the same rose madder for an hour when the owl dropped onto the windowsill, unbothered by the rain. 'You're letting the heat out,' she told it, though the stove had been cold since Tuesday. The island ran on that kind of arrangement. The ferry came when the sea allowed, and the owl came when it pleased.

Keep reading

Her father had painted the oak at the bottom of the lane every autumn for forty years, always in black ink first, always leaving the top branches for last. Nell had inherited his brushes but not his patience. She dipped a size-eight into the cerulean and flicked it across the paper, watching the wash bleed into the pink like weather rolling over the Sound.

On the last morning of the month, the rooks lifted out of the oak all at once, a spill of black specks that poured past the window and scattered over the water. Nell ran down the lane with the wet sheet clutched to her chest. The tree still stood, dark and solid, but a bloom of blue and rose drifted from its crown where the birds had been, as though the colour had been waiting inside them all along.

She pinned the painting above the stove. The owl had gone. In the morning she found three feathers on the sill, orange as the rust on the pier, and she laid them in the paint tin to dry, deciding the colours would keep.