Full arm sleeve tattoo in a watercolour style with blue, purple and orange washes and black splatter across the shoulder, upper arm and forearm.

Watercolour splatter sleeve on arm

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman wears a pink bra while showing a large sleeve tattoo running from the shoulder down the forearm. The design is made of loose, painterly washes in blue, purple, orange and pink, with thin black linework and scattered black ink splatters. The colour is layered densely across the arm, and the composition moves diagonally from the shoulder towards the wrist.

Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Sleeve Watercolour Splatter Abstract Brushstroke 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 learn early that the pit takes the colour out of everything. By the time you are nine, the washhouse windows are the colour of weak tea, and the lamps on the shift bus smear the dark like thumbprints. Your father sign-paints the lodge notices in black enamel because black is what the men can read from across the yard, and he tells you a brighter brush is a waste of good water.

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So you keep the jam jars under the stairs. Ultramarine, a rinse of rose madder, the orange you scraped from the back of a tin your aunt posted from Glasgow. You work at night when the kitchen has gone quiet and the fire has crusted over, letting the colour run wet across the back of a spoiled notice until it bleeds into the paper like weather. In the morning your father finds one on the table. He says nothing, only folds it and puts it in his pocket, which you take to mean something.

The week the lodge shuts its gates, the men stand about the square in their Sunday coats with nothing to do with their hands. You fetch the stepladder and a bucket of thinned blue and climb to the washhouse wall, the one that has been grey since before your grandmother was born. Nobody asks you to. You lay the wash on fast, purple at the shoulder, orange where a window would let the light in if there were a window, and you flick black from the end of the brush until the wall looks like the inside of a storm.

By dinnertime the rain has got into the paint and the colours have run down to the gutter in long bruised streams. Your father stands at the foot of the ladder with his hands in his pockets for a long time. Then he takes the brush from you, dips it in the orange and draws one clean line along the bottom of the wall, and that is how you know the wall is not grey any more.