Collage of six colourful watercolour-style tattoos, including a wolf head, a splashed bird across a woman's upper back and shoulder, an elephant on an upper arm, and an orange sun on a man's arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour wolf, bird, elephant and sun tattoos

Back · Colour · Photo

This collage shows six photographs of colourful tattoos: a wolf head, a bird or phoenix with splashing wings across a woman's back and shoulder, a sun on a man's forearm and upper arm, a floral design on a woman's arm, and an elephant on an upper arm. The linework is loose and painterly, with the colour blended and dripped into the shapes. Bright reds, blues, greens and oranges dominate, and the background splashes are part of the design.

Back Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Wolf Bird Phoenix Elephant Sun Flower Splash Watercolour

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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

Mind the bucket by your boot, love, it's still wet. Aye, that's the last of Tomas's blue. He never could close a lid. Pull up that stool and I'll tell you how the river went to paint.

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The summer the Lenz ran dry, every well in Hollin Cross gave up its water, and Tomas, who painted signs for the inn and the chapel, had nothing left but his pots. He tipped the lot into the gully behind his shop to see what the sun would make of it. Red ran into orange, orange into a green that smelled of lemons, and the whole gully shone like a dropped jewel tray. Next morning a grey wolf came down off the fell, thin as a bent nail, and put his nose to the wet colour. He drank the blue first. When he lifted his head his eyes had gone the colour of the sky before rain.

Then came the elephant from the travelling fair, which had lost its keeper and its nerve in the same week. It waded into the orange, trumpeted once, and came out striped like a barber's pole, dripping teal from its ears. Last of all a bird nobody had ever named came over the roofs with its wings open. It dipped low over the splashes and shook them loose, and red and gold scattered across the chapel roof, the inn sign and Mrs Pryce's washing line. Everything it touched kept the colour.

Tomas never painted another sign for money. He said the village had been paid already. Some evenings you can still see the gully glowing, and the wolf sleeps there with his chin on his paws. Now drink your tea before it sets, and mind the green on your sleeve.