Forearm tattoo of a figure with spiky dark hair, drawn in sketchy black linework with pink, purple and red watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour portrait with sketched linework on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A head and shoulders portrait of a figure with wild, spiky dark hair is tattooed on the forearm. Loose, sketchy black linework defines the hair and face, while pink, purple and red watercolour-style washes spread across the background and figure. The design fills most of the frame against plain skin, with a partial view of a light-coloured sleeve at the right edge.

Forearm Portrait Figure Watercolour splash Sketch Linework

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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

You climb the scaffold outside the Lantern Cinema at half past eleven because the job has to be finished before the council man comes on Monday. Below, the street is doing its late-night business: a taxi idling with its meter lit, someone laughing too loudly outside the kebab shop, a bottle rolling along the gutter as if it has somewhere to be. The hoarding is still blank in the middle, a grey rectangle waiting for a face.

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The face belongs to Dolores Quay, who sang at the Lantern in 1961 and vanished the week after with the takings. Nobody paid for her to be painted, but Mr Achterberg, the owner, gave you the wall in exchange for a bottle of Scotch and your promise not to sign it. So you work fast. You sketch the hair first, black slashes that refuse to lie down, then the mouth, the jaw, the cigarette she never lit. The washes go on wet: rose, plum, a red that bleeds into the brick.

Around one, a woman in a green coat stops beneath the scaffold and tilts her head. "That's her," she says, as though you have summoned something. "My mum swore she saw her at the bus stop on Tallow Lane." You don't answer. You dip the brush again, and the purple runs down over the shoulder in a long bruise of colour, and the woman walks on, and the wall keeps watching the street as if it has been waiting for someone to notice.

By dawn the paint is dry and the scaffold is coming down. You stand in the road with the tin under your arm and look up. The hair catches the first grey light, spiky and defiant, and for once you cannot tell whether the face is smiling or just about to speak.