Colourful watercolour-style sun tattoo in yellow, purple and turquoise with swirling ornament on the calf.

Watercolour sun on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A yellow sun with swirling inner detail sits at the centre of this tattoo, surrounded by purple and turquoise wash-like splashes and fine ornamental scrollwork. The linework is light and the colour is soft-edged, with the splashes trailing down the leg in a loose vertical composition. The photograph shows the design on a lower leg against a dark plastic-covered surface.

Calf Sun Watercolour Swirl Ornament Splash Scrollwork

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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

Sit down by the wall, the lot of you, and mind the wasps in the windfalls. This was late August, the summer the Harrow orchard got so hot the apples split on the branch. Old Mother Pell swore the sun had come down the lane that year, because nothing else would have made the Bramleys blush like that.

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The sun was a lazy thing, and proud with it. It had got itself snagged low over the hedge, its rays tangled in the plum trees, and it couldn't climb back up for the weight of its own gold. So it sent a sparrow-lad with ink on his beak to fetch a pot of colour from the dyer in Cold Ashby. The dyer had only purple left, and a stoppered bottle of sea-green that someone had left out in the rain. Both were for the sun's own use, the boy was told, and he was not to let the bottle touch the ground.

He let it touch the ground. He always did. The green ran off down the orchard path and into the beck, and the purple climbed up into the plums, and when the sun finally sat up and saw the mess, it laughed so hard its light curled back on itself like fiddleheads.

That's why the beck runs blue in August and why the plums go dark before the sun has finished with them. And if you go down there at dusk and see a gold curl caught in the reeds, leave it be. It's only the sun, trying to remember which colour it started with.