Colour tattoo of a vintage film camera with teal and purple washes and pink and green paint drips below it, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style camera on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A vintage film camera with an ornate top plate and a large round lens sits at the centre of the design. The camera body is filled with soft teal, green and purple washes, with dark linework defining the lens and dials. Below it, pink lines and green, purple and pink splatters trail downwards, giving a watercolour effect on skin.

Forearm Camera Lens Watercolour 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

Pull that stool up nearer, and mind the puddle by your boot, because the rain in this city never stops long enough to dry. You want the story of the green camera? Then you'll hear it the way it was told to me, by a man who sold cigarettes from a hatch on Cheapside and swore every word was true.

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Everybody on that street owned a bit of the story. Rosie Okafor ran the print shop under the railway arches, and she had one rule: no camera came through her door unless its lens had been cleaned with spit and patience. One November night a young fellow arrived with a silver-bodied thing wrapped in a scarf, its top plate worked over with curlicues like an old iron gate. He wanted three frames developed by morning. He would not say where they were shot.

Rosie pulled the negatives at midnight, with the trains rattling overhead and the fixer stinging her knuckles. The first two were ordinary: a bus shelter, a wet dog. The third showed the lens itself, dead centre, and in its glass floated a blurred teal sky, with a spill of pink and violet beneath it, as though the rain had soaked up every colour the street had been hiding. The drips ran straight down from the shutter like paint thrown at a wall, and she laughed, because they looked exactly like they were falling.

At dawn the young man came back for his prints. Rosie handed him the third and asked where it was taken. He tapped the glass very gently and said, 'Right where you're standing.' Then he was gone, and the camera stayed on her counter. She still keeps it there, and when the pink drips start running down the neon at closing time, she lifts the lens and takes the shot.