Colourful watercolour-style tattoo across a forearm, with purple, blue, pink, red and green washes and dark ink specks.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour splash tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

An abstract design of loose washes and splatters runs across the forearm, with a burst of dark blue and black spots near the centre. The shading is soft and blended, with no hard outlines, and the colour is applied in purple, blue, pink, red and green. The arm fills most of the frame against a plain cream wall.

Forearm Watercolour Splash Abstract Paint splatter Wash

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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

Right, sit down where the lamp reaches, because this is the one about Ada Pellow and the net vats, and I'll not tell it twice. Her father dyed the nets down at Polwenn every spring, boiling bark and madder root in the big iron coppers behind the net loft, so the lines would hold against the salt and the sun. Madder made the red, weld made the yellow, and the blue came from woad that stank so bad the gulls wouldn't land within a street of it. Ada was twelve that year and she thought the colours were the only sensible thing in the village.

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It was late March, wind from the south-west, and the fleet was out past the Mouse Rock with nine boats. Her father had left a crock of indigo on the wall by the slipway, and Ada, who had been told not to touch it, carried it down to rinse a cloth and tripped on the wet stone. The crock broke. Half the dye went into the harbour in a blue-black burst, spreading in rings over the green weed, pinking at the edges where the madder had run off the quay, and purple where the two met. Her father came up the hill shouting, then stopped and looked, because the water had gone the colour of a bruise and the low sun was coming through it.

The boats came home by dusk, all nine, and the men said they had followed a stain of colour on the swell like a lantern. The mackerel came in after it, thick as thread, and nobody in Polwenn ever again called Ada careless with paint. Ada still says the splash is what brought them home. Her father says the wind did that. I say the sea has always liked a bright thing dropped on it, and that's enough from me tonight.