The tip.

Like I've said before, I have pretty sensitive nails. Right when I start to think that I've been particularly kind to them, they will start to peel on me. I just keep having to cut them pretty short to get rid of the peeling nail tips.
When I know that my nails are having a particularly rough week, but I have polish on, I'm wary of removing it right then even when they are lookin' pretty rough and chipped, because I know it'll only dry them out again. Sometimes I just need to try and make my manicure looking decent for as long as possible, or do away with it altogether for a while. This past week I've had just a solid coat of polish on my nails, I wanted to have something on but I didn't want it to be too loud. This is one of my favorite go-to neutral polishes, Eternal Optimist by Essie:

After nearly a week, my nails look pretty dingy, chipped and generally beat up:

But aside from the tips, they don't look horrible, and if I could stand to look at them like that any longer I would just leave them like this cause lazy. I did end up taking it off, but I thought I might come up with some ideas for you in case this is often your predicament and your nails just need a little...refurbishing, let's say.
For my left hand, I went with the 3-stroke-clouds for my pointer finger using both white and silver polishes. For my middle (messily), I went over the entire nail in white (you could use any color, I'm sure...) and used a small dotting tool while the polish was still wet and sort of carved out/engraved some dots and hearts. I screwed up my ring finger, but for my pinky I did a half circle in white and used a dotting tool to make the outside of the curve look "bumpy" and used the same tool to make dots on the side in the same color as my nail. For my thumb, I did practically the same thing as my pinky except using a sort of sweetheart-neckline shape and put my dots in different places.

For my right hand, I started running out of on-the-spot ideas and just went with a french manicure for my thumb that I achieved having cut a curve out of painters tape and placing it on my nail as a french manicure stencil. Paint your tip white, peel the tape off and voila! For my pointer, I messily went over my tip in white and used black and silver striping polishes to make a sort of feathery looking design.

I'm sure I can come up with more ideas, but these are just what I came up with in a few minutes this afternoon.