Collage of four watercolour-style tattoos: a hot air balloon on a forearm, a compass rose on the torso, a bird on an arm and an elephant on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tattoos: balloon, compass, bird and elephant

Forearm · Colour · Photo

This collage shows four colourful tattoos on skin. The top left panel has a hot air balloon with a small basket and a dangling anchor, and the top right has a compass rose with a map-like background. The bottom panels show a blue bird and an elephant, both built from loose colour washes and splashes with soft, blended edges.

Forearm Upper arm Ribs Hot air balloon Compass Bird Elephant Anchor Watercolour Splashes

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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 hold the ladder while Uncle Tobias ties the balloon to the old Bramley at the bottom of Cutler's Orchard, late August, wasps drunk on the windfalls. The envelope slumps and breathes against the branches like something half asleep. He shows you the anchor hanging from the basket, a rusted thing he hauled out of a harbour that no longer appears on any chart you own, and tells you it has been waiting a long time for a boat with a reason to leave.

Keep reading

The compass was your grandmother's. She had its needle stitched into the lining of her coat, and when the coat went to the rag bin you took the needle out and kept it in a biscuit tin. Nobody asked you to bring it. North, she used to say, is only north if you keep saying it out loud, so you say it now, quietly, while the burner roars and the ground lets go.

The orchard shrinks to a smudge of green and rust. Below you the hills run into each other like colour dropped in water, blue bleeding into grey, and the river takes up the sky's gold. A grey elephant from the circus poster on the barn wall moves across the stubble far beneath you, slow and certain, keeping pace as though it carries the same map in its head. You have never seen one wander so far from a show.

When the burner cuts out over the river, you hold the needle to the last of the light. It swings, doubts, then settles towards the white paper gaps where the colours thin out. You drop the anchor. It catches in the willows, and you climb down the rope hand over hand, apples bruising in your pockets, already certain that the orchard is only one day behind you now.