Colour tattoo of a sketchy camera with rainbow watercolour wash and black linework, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style camera on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A camera is drawn in loose, sketchy black linework with a rainbow wash of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. The lens is shaded with a glossy highlight, and small aperture numbers (1.8, 2.8, 3.5) sit beside it. Colour runs and drips below the design on smooth skin with a few moles visible.

Back Camera Lens

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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

Nobody in Leith Walk wanted to hear about the camera that wouldn't stop dripping, so I told them anyway, standing on an upturned crate outside the chippy while the rain made rainbows of the streetlamps. Old Mirren Duff had bought it off a sailor for two quid and a bag of dried figs, and it was sketched all over in black ink, like someone had drawn it in a hurry on a bus. Every time she pressed the shutter, the colours came out wet. Red spilled from the viewfinder. Blue ran off the strap. Green pooled on the pavement where she stood.

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She took one photograph of the Usher Hall at midnight, and the picture came out so bright that the gulls on the railings started singing in tune with the trams. Then she set the lens to 2.8 and walked into the dark closes behind the market, because that was where the real city lived, she said. People shouted at her from windows. A baker threw a loaf at her and it came out of the air as a hot cross bun, glistening with orange glaze.

The last shot she ever took was of her own reflection in a puddle on Dalry Road. When the paper came back from the shop the next morning, the frame was blank except for three numbers scratched in the corner, 1.8, 2.8, 3.5, and a single bright drip running down the margin, still wet, as if the camera had been crying for her. I'm told it's still in the window of the second-hand shop, and if you hold it up to the lamp, you can see the colours moving.