Watercolour-style tattoo of a blue police box on the upper arm, with loose black linework and splashes of blue and purple.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour TARDIS on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blue police box, shaped like the TARDIS, fills the upper arm, with its door, panes and roof outlined in dark linework. Soft blue, lilac and pink washes bleed past the outline, with black ink splatters around the edges. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a plain skin background and a blue top, with bamboo visible behind.

Upper arm Tardis Police box Door Window Splatter

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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

The last of the canvas comes down before the rain does, and you are the one who has to fold the ring curtain while Mrs Vosper counts the takings into a biscuit tin. Nobody bought a ticket for the blue box this week. It sits at the far end of the field where the lorries used to be, its paint gone soft at the corners like something left out in the wet, and the lamp on its roof has not lit since spring.

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You were told as a child never to go inside it. Old Pell, who ran the high wire before his knees gave out, said it had belonged to a conjuror who vanished in a fog over Lincoln with the box still locked and the key in his own pocket. Everyone laughed. Still, when the wind lifts the flap of the stage tent, you find yourself crossing the stubble with sawdust clinging to your boots, and you press your palm flat against a door whose panes hold a wash of evening sky.

Inside is a room with a ceiling you cannot see, a smell of wet ink and cut hay, and a single chair facing a wall of tall windows. Through them you see the big top at dusk, each window a different year. You see yourself on the trapeze at nineteen. You see Pell laughing in the front row. You see the striped tent going up again while every band in the county plays. You step back out, and the field is empty except for the lorries.

Mrs Vosper is waiting at the gate with the tin under her arm. "Well?" she says. You tell her the box is bigger than it looks. She nods and asks whether the takings will stretch to one more season. You look back at the blue door, its black ink splashed across the grass like spilt dye, and you say yes, because for the first time all year it is true.