A small watercolour-style unicorn tattoo in pink and purple tones on the inner forearm, with a thin dark outline and a spiralling mane.

Watercolour unicorn on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A unicorn is shown mid-stride in profile, with a thin dark outline and a spiralling horn, mane and tail. The shading is soft and washed, with pink, lilac and blue tones fading into the skin, and the hooves are touched with teal. The design sits centrally on the inner forearm against a plain light background, with a dark sleeve edge at the top of the frame.

Forearm Unicorn Horse Mane Horn Tail

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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 have been told not to go past the dyers' vats at the forest edge after dark, and so of course you go. The river runs the colour of weak tea below the mill, and the washing lines behind the cottages sag with cloth still dripping pink and indigo. Your mother says wool takes colour best in cold water, which is why she sends you out with the buckets before the sun is properly up.

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At the tree line, the unicorn stands in the ferns as if it had been painted there and forgotten to dry. Its horn is a thin spiral of cream, and each time it moves its tail leaves a smear of lilac on the air that takes a long breath to settle. It does not look at you so much as through you, the way a crow watches a field before deciding it is not worth the walk.

You set the buckets down. Nobody in the village has ever seen one. Old Maud swears she has, but Maud also swears the church bell rang itself the winter the Gorse boy drowned. The unicorn lowers its head to the stream and drinks, and where its hooves touch the wet stones, teal blooms and sinks into the rock like ink into a soaked page. You take the fine brush from your apron pocket, the one you use for marking the cloth, and wait.

It lifts its head and shakes its mane, and a drift of colour falls across the blue wool on the nearest line. By morning every length of cloth in the village has a pale rose edge that will not wash out, and nobody can say whose hand it came from. Your mother holds one up to the light and says nothing. You say nothing either, but you dip the brush in the river, shake it dry, and keep it in your pocket.