Colour tattoo on an ankle with orange, red, green and blue paint-like washes, black ink splatters and outlined circles.

Watercolour splash and bubbles on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo on the ankle and lower leg of a person with pale skin, made up of loose washes of orange, red, green and blue. Several outlined circles and a larger pale circle sit among black ink splatters and drips. The colour washes run diagonally up the leg, with the splatters concentrated around the centre of the design.

Ankle Splatter Paint splash Circle Bubble Abstract shape

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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

Shuffle in, shuffle in, and mind the drip off the gutter, it has been saving itself up all week to land on the back of someone's neck. This is the tale of Wren Harrow, who painted the sea onto the underside of the water tower at Sallow Mill, because nobody living had ever seen it and she reckoned a town ought to have something to look at besides rust.

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She ground her pigments from blackcurrant, rust and the blue clay down at the reservoir, and she worked them wet, the way her grandmother had taught her, with a pot of rainwater and a brush worn down to a whisker. Orange went on first, then red bled into it like a fever breaking, then green crept in from the edges where the wash dried thin. The children followed her about with jam jars. Whenever one of them blew soap through a loop of wire, Wren would stop and say, 'That is the sea breathing out. Catch it before it goes.'

Then came the autumn the ink went over. Old Tobias Quill dropped his writing pot off the scaffold, and the black spread across her half-dried washes like a shadow falling off a cliff. The council wanted it scraped. Wren went up the ladder at dusk with a sponge and a bowl of water and did not come down until the splatters were the only honest thing left on the wall. She said the spill had done more than she could ever have planned.

When the paint was finally dry, the whole town came out to look. Every bubble she had painted was perfectly round and perfectly still, and somewhere among them, small as a thumbprint, a real bubble from a child's wire had caught in the wet and never burst. Nobody could say how it had lasted. Wren just laughed and said that was the bit she had not painted, and that was the bit they should keep.