Colourful giraffe head tattoo on the inner forearm, drawn in purple, pink, blue and teal with a soft watercolour look.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour giraffe head on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A giraffe head fills the forearm, shown face on with large ears, dark eyes and ossicones. The patches of the coat are filled with blocks of purple, pink, blue and teal that blend softly into one another. The design is centred on the arm against a blurred background with a leopard print top at the edge of the frame.

Forearm Giraffe Animal Head

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

Sit down, all of you, and stop kicking the vats. The dye-sellers of Alexandria will tell you the giraffe came up the Nile in a boat too narrow for it, its neck poking out of the reed sail like a mast. That part is true. What they leave out is Nikandra, the dyer's daughter, who had a bowl of madder in one hand and a bowl of woad in the other and no patience for either.

Keep reading

The governor wanted the beast dyed for the games, one colour only, the red of the legion's cloaks. Nikandra looked at the animal for three days. Its patches reminded her of river stones worn smooth by the current, each one dark at the centre and paler at the edge. So she mixed wash after wash, letting the purple of the woad soften into the pink of the madder, and the pink into the blue of the harbour water, so that every patch bled gently into the next the way the sky does when the sun goes down behind the lighthouse.

On the day of the games the crowd roared for red and got instead a creature that looked as if the sea had been poured over it at dusk. The governor shouted for her to be whipped. But when the giraffe lowered its long head to the crowd, the colours ran in the spray from the fountains, and the water in the basin turned violet, then rose, then blue. The people stopped shouting. The governor, too, went quiet.

And if you walk to the harbour at evening, children, you will still see a faint bloom of violet at the edge of the stones, where the beast once drank. That is where the colour went, into the water, and the fishermen have never once been able to wash it out.