Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a deer on the outer thigh, with splashes of pink, blue, green and yellow around the animal's outline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour deer on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A deer is shown in profile, with its body formed by bare skin inside a loose outline of watercolour splashes. The surrounding ink runs in pink, blue, green, yellow and purple, with fine dots and spatter spreading beyond the main shape. The photo is taken close up from the front, with a person's painted fingernails and dark shorts visible at the top of the frame.

Thigh Deer Stag Splatter Animal

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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

Get your feet off the cabin roof, the paint's still tacky, and sit where I can see you. Mind the lock, it sticks in wet weather, same as your grandmother used to stick in a doorway when she wanted the last word.

Keep reading

The winter the river froze at Hungerford, my Aunt Ada took a brush to the side of the Mary Jane and painted every colour left in the tin: pink first, then blue, then the green of old pennies. A stag came down to the weir each dusk to drink, one antler snapped at the tip. She tried to paint him while he drank, but he never stood still long enough, so she painted the splash his muzzle made in the water, then the spatter flung off his flanks, then the air around him, until the whole boat looked like it had been dipped in a rainbow.

In April he came back tame, bold as a barge horse, and stood on the towpath staring at the boat. Ada said nothing. She folded her arms and let him look, because the animal in the picture was never the paint at all. It was the bare wood where he should have been, the part she had left unpainted on purpose. Every splash was arranged around that gap, so the eye would fill it with a stag.

So when the rain takes the colours off in a few years, you won't find the deer. You'll find the hole he stood in, and that's the only part of him anybody ever kept. Now pass me that kettle, and if you hear hooves on the towpath tonight, don't go out. He's only checking the paint is still wet.