Colourful watercolour-style New York skyline tattoo with the Empire State Building on a forearm, in blue, purple, pink and teal.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour New York skyline on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a city skyline silhouette with the Empire State Building on the right, filled with soft, bleeding washes of blue, purple, pink and teal. Small dots of colour sit above the skyline, and the edges of the washes are loose and uneven rather than outlined. The design runs horizontally across the forearm against a dark shirt, with a red string bracelet visible at the wrist.

Forearm Skyline City Dot

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

The rain came through the skylight at ten past four, which was the third time that week, and Ida Vance stood on a paint-spattered stool with a tea towel in one hand and a wet brush in the other, trying to decide which mattered more. The brush won. She had a commission due on Friday, a view of the harbour city for Mr Okonedo, who had crossed the water to live there forty years ago and now wanted it on paper before his eyes gave out.

Keep reading

She had wet the sheet the night before, so the colour would bleed wherever it pleased. She laid the blues first, a cool wash low on the paper for the river, then let violet soak into the rooftops while the surface was still glossy. The tall tower on the right she painted with a single fine brush, measuring its spire against a postcard propped on the jar of rinse water. Pink went in where the dusk touched the glass. When the paper began to dull she flicked a stiff brush above the skyline and let little drops of teal and rose land like gulls that had lost their nerve.

Mr Okonedo came early on Friday, his stick tapping the boards before he reached the table. He could no longer make out the shapes, so she described them. The towers, she said, were not really edged. They simply stopped where the colour gave up. He nodded slowly. "That's how I remember it," he said. "Nobody's lines were ever that tidy."

He reached out and rested a thumb on the spire, which was still faintly tacky. When he lifted it, a smudge of rose stayed on his skin. He looked at it for a long time, then pressed his thumb gently to the margin of the paper, a second print beside the first. "Leave that," he said. Ida left it, and she never did go back to draw the outline she had planned.