Watercolour-style whale tattoo in blue, teal and purple with orange and pink splashes and black ink dots, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Watercolour whale on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A whale, shaped like an orca, is outlined in fine black linework and filled with soft blue, teal and purple washes. Orange, pink, green and blue splashes with black ink dots trail from its tail across the skin. The tattoo sits diagonally across the upper back, with a dark strap at the top edge of the frame.

Back Whale Splash Watercolour Abstract

Find an artist for this

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 lorry from Bergen has been idling in bay four since six, and the manifest says artists' pigments, sundry, which is the sort of phrase that makes you reach for the crowbar. You climb onto the tailboard with Dilys holding the torch. Rain drums the corrugated roof of the shed at Harwich, and the air smells of diesel and wet cardboard.

Keep reading

Behind the tubes of cadmium and ultramarine there is a flat crate, stencilled with a rough whale in marker pen. You prise the lid. Inside, pressed between sheets of tissue, is a painting: an orca cutting through a sea of blue and violet, its tail breaking apart into orange, pink and green spray. Someone has flicked black ink across the wash, a scatter of dots that look almost like rain falling upward.

Dilys says it can't be declared, that nobody sells paintings out of a crate with a biro whale on the side. You say everything with a price on it is declarable and everything without one is a question. Then you find a folded note under the lid, in a looping hand: Take it over the water. It was made for a sea that has never once asked for a passport.

You stamp the form, tick the box marked nothing to declare, and sign your name where the driver can see it. Outside, the lorry grinds into gear and rolls through the gate towards the road to Ipswich. A single black dot of ink sits on your thumb and won't come off with soap, and when you look up the rain has thinned to a clean light over the water.