Although Harkins wrote a one-act community play performed in Carlisle in 1987, he gave up writing soon afterwards and worked in a food factory and as a cleaner. After he married, the couple moved to Silloth, and Harkins turned to visual art, principally painting nude and erotic portraits, many of his wife, and selling them online, as well as caring for the couple's disabled son.[1][2][7] They later returned to live in Carlisle.[8] He is not to be confused with an Edinburgh-born abstract artist also named David Harkins.