Colourful watercolour-style splash tattoo with a watch face and numerals on the inner wrist and lower forearm.

Watercolour splash and watch on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A watch face with black numerals and hands sits at the wrist, surrounded by a splash of pink, red, blue and purple paint-like colour that drips upwards along the forearm. Small white sparkle marks are scattered through the splash, and the watch strap is solid black. The shading is soft and blended, with the colour dominating and a blurred background showing a painted figure.

Forearm Watch Clock Paint splash Numeral Sparkle Wrist

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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 reach the petrol station at Calder Wells just as the sun gives up being polite. The attendant, a man called Ousley with a pencil behind one ear, slides a cracked pocket watch across the counter and says it stopped the week the river dried. You know that watch. You sold it to him in March, back when you still believed a stopped clock was simply a clock that needed a battery.

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The road out of Calder runs eighty miles dead straight, and the heat lifts the asphalt into shimmering lakes that never get any closer. Past the salt flats you pull onto the shoulder, wind the crown until it bites, and the hands jerk forward. A drip of red leaks from the case, then blue, then a violet so deep it looks wet. It runs up the dashboard, over the windscreen and into the sky, as if someone has tipped a paint tin over the whole afternoon. The numerals loosen from the dial and drift upward, a nine, an eight, a crooked little seven, hanging in the air like dust in a cathedral.

You try to catch them. Each numeral you close your fingers around leaves a white spark on your palm, bright as a star in a sky that hasn't finished getting dark. By sunset you have six sparks, a fistful of blue and a watch with no face, and the road ahead has started to bend in ways roads should not bend.

You drive on with the empty case ticking against the steering wheel. When you glance in the mirror, the desert behind you has been repainted in the same colours, the drips running upward toward the first star, and the clock on the dashboard shows the exact minute you left Calder, politely, as if it has all the time in the world.