Colour tattoo of a skull in a loose watercolour style with blue, pink, orange and green washes, on the upper arm near the shoulder.

Watercolour skull on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A skull is drawn in fine outline and filled with loose, bleeding washes of blue, pink, orange, yellow and green, with black shading in the eye sockets and nasal cavity. Dark ink splatters and drips surround the skull and trail down from its lower edge. The tattoo sits on the upper arm, photographed close up with the shoulder and a pale vest visible around it.

Upper arm Skull Splatter Drip

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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

The rain has been going since the last tram, and you are still on the scaffold outside the ironmonger's on Bell Street, lettering a skull onto the hoarding because the client wanted it bigger and brighter than the council allowed. Your brush is wet with more water than paint now. Below you the gutter runs in ribbons of blue and rust, carrying off whatever the day left on the pavement.

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Nobody asked you for a skull. The order said something for the window, no words. So you drew the bone first in pencil, fine as a hair, then let the colour find its own way: a cobalt wash that bled into magenta, orange dragged across the brow like a match struck in the dark. Where the paint ran too far you flicked black ink from the end of a quill and called it weather. Mr Okafor from the upholstery shop opposite watches from his doorway with a cigarette he never lights, and says the thing is either beautiful or a warning, depending on which side of the road you stand.

By two in the morning the sheet is finished and drying under the streetlamp. You climb down, counting the drips that trail from its jaw to the kerb. A taxi splashes through the puddle at the corner, and the wave lifts the orange from the skull's cheek and carries it off, a thin colour running towards the grate. You stand there longer than you need to, watching the thing you made lose a little of itself to the drain, and you realise that is the only part of it that was ever going to be true.