Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a winged unicorn in purple, blue and orange with black linework, on a limb of pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour winged unicorn

Other · Colour · Photo

A winged unicorn in a loose, sketchy style rears to the right, with its horn, mane and feathered wings drawn in dark fine lines. Purple, blue, pink and orange wash through the body and wings, with splattered dots and soft fades that suggest watercolour paint. The design fills most of the frame against plain pale skin.

Other Unicorn Wing Horse Feather

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

Dear Ruth,

Keep reading

Mr Tallis wanted his boat called Second Wind and a horse on her bow, the sort with wings that the old men in the Anchor swear they saw over the breakwater the winter his brother drowned. I told him I'd paint what I could, and he could pay me in cod if the horse came out wrong. He didn't laugh, so I knew he meant it.

I did the outline in black first, quick and loose, the way Dad taught us to draw rope before the knots. Then the wash. Violet for the mane, blue where the spray would catch it, a shock of pink along the wing and a band of orange where the evening sun comes through the harbour mouth. I flicked the brush at the end so the paint spat across the hull like sea foam, and Tallis swore at me for getting it on his good coat.

The rain came in on the Tuesday and I was sure the whole thing would run into the scuppers. It didn't. The purple held where the lines were darkest, and the blue thinned out into the grey of the water so the horse seemed to lift off the wood as the light changed. Tallis stood in the drizzle at six in the morning, looking up at it with his cap in his hands.

He took the boat out on Thursday. I watched from the wall. When she cleared the harbour mouth, a gull came low over the bow and settled on the horse's raised foreleg, the way gulls sit on anything that stays still long enough. Tallis waved at me. I think he meant the gull.

Love, Nell