Abstract tattoo of black lines, grey dots and red and teal brush strokes running down a forearm.

Abstract brush strokes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm with loose, abstract marks that resemble paint splashes and thin stems or stalks. Black lines and solid dots form most of the design, with soft grey-blue dots scattered across the skin. Small red and teal strokes add colour accents, and the composition sweeps diagonally from the wrist up towards the elbow against a plain white background.

Forearm Abstract Brush stroke Paint splatter Dot Line Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painter's boy had knocked the ink pot over the caravan step at first light, and by the time the rest of the fair was stirring he was still on his knees with a rag, trying to save the cloth he had been sent to finish. Madam Orla came across the wet grass in her green boots and looked down at the black pool spreading between the boards.

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'You have made a field,' she said. 'Look where it runs.' Tobias saw it then. The ink had pulled into thin stalks where it met the seams, each one ending in a bead like a seed head. Grey drops of thinned paint had flicked off his brush the day before and sat around the stalks like dew. Madam Orla said her mother had kept a field of reeds beside a river she never named, and that the fair had carried it in the back of a wagon for forty years on a painted board nobody had ever finished. Tobias said he could only paint dots and lines. She told him that was how reeds were made.

They worked through the afternoon. He painted the stems tall and uneven, and she pressed a red brushstroke where the wind would catch them. A teal streak went low where the water sat. When the sun dropped behind the dodgems, the board leaned against the caravan and the reeds seemed to lean with it, as if someone had just walked past.

In the morning the fair was gone from Thorncombe, and the board went with it. Tobias found a single drop of black on the step, dried in the shape of a seed head, and he did not wipe it away. The next spring, when the fair came back, Madam Orla had a new wagon, and on its side, among the reeds, a small figure knelt with a rag, which she said was a mistake she had decided to keep.