“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” – Rabindranath Tagore
Clouds are many things to many people. Maybe that is why these mysterious, impressive white veils of vapor are popular when it comes to selecting one’s ink. Cloud designs for tattoos become such an arresting focal point in many designs. Clouds are full of symbolism and represent more than just a piece of personal sky.
David Beckham is one celebrity who has been adding more and more beautiful artwork to his body over the years. His sleeve tattoos bear an arrangement of heavenly billowing clouds along with an angel on his right upper arm and ink of cherubs nestled under his biceps. He was once quoted as saying, “Everybody’s got a way of expressing their feelings, and mine is through my tattoos.”
Singer Hayley Williams sports a unique little cloud tattoo behind her left ear with the word ‘warped’ printed above the tattoo with a lightning bolt coming out of it and tiny raindrops falling. The body work represents Williams’ ‘Cleveland Warped Tour 2009 show.’ A major storm had hit just before Williams’ set came on, and she never wanted to forget the moment she has told fans.
Cassadee Pope is another celebrity who enjoys looking at clouds floating across her right forearm. The singer started out with a tat of a blue bird with a long, cascading string of musical notes coming out of its beak. Little by little she then chose more stunning colors for the arm with bright blue and pink clouds behind the bird to cover in the empty areas of the forearm and complete her personal bodywork.
Clouds are sometimes placed in a tattoo to bring focus to other images in a design. As Cassadee Pope selected, clouds can fill in the spaces and and join other tattoos together in a moving collage of life’s memorable moments. Clouds can also display feelings of anger, sadness, happiness, etc., depending on the type of cloud depicted. For instance, high fluffy cumulus clouds appear on nice, bright days. These are the happy, marshmallow, cotton puff clouds that bring a smile to the face. There are also stratus clouds that hang low to the ground in gray, somber shapes that can stand for sadness or darker days.
One must not forget the religious significance that clouds often represent in a tattoo. Clouds are sometimes joined with angels or crosses or tattoos of Jesus reaching to the heavens. Clouds seem to bring the eye up to another place far and beyond. Cloud tattoos can also be formed into different shapes and sizes to create images within the cloud formation in a surrealistic or fantasy design.
Cloud tattoos might sound insignificant as background filler, but as one can see by observing many unique and personal pieces of body art, these white veils of vapor are more than a beautiful part of nature. Children like to lie on the grass looking up at the clouds, trying to find faces, objects, or some meaning in the cotton-like lightness and whiteness of these rolling, billowy globs. No two clouds are alike and thankfully so.
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