Back and upper arm of a person with abstract painterly brushstroke lines in blue, green, pink and orange, with thin black linework sweeping from the shoulder down the back.

Abstract brushstroke lines across back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A person is photographed from behind with their head turned away. Thin black lines sweep diagonally across the back and over the shoulder and upper arm, with loose blue, green, pink and yellow washes beside them. Small black splatter marks sit on an orange wash on the upper arm, and the background is a plain dark red wall.

Back Upper arm Brushstroke Abstract Line Splash Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river had gone to mud by the third week of the flood, and Hannah Oyelaran stopped trying to paint the water as water. She painted what it did. She painted the way the current bent around the pier posts like a hand closing on a rope, and the way the late light slid off the brown surface in long wet strokes. Her father had taught her to hold the brush loose, to let the wrist do the arguing. He had never once let her finish a painting in the studio above the chandler's shop. He said the room was too tidy for anything true.

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The commission came from a woman in Bristol who wanted something to hang above a bath. Hannah said yes before she had worked out what she would say. Then she spent two nights with a jar of blue lake and a stack of cheap paper, dragging black ink across each sheet in one pass, because a second pass always killed the line. Most of the sheets went into the grate. One of them she kept, a single curve that rose from the bottom corner and ran off the top as if it had somewhere better to be.

She sent the woman a photograph of it pinned to the wall. The reply came two days later, one line: could it be bigger, and could the splashes be less polite. Hannah laughed out loud in the empty shop. She took the sheet down, folded it twice, and went to find a bigger sheet and a worse mood.

The finished painting was four feet long. The woman wrote that it made her bath feel like the river, which Hannah thought was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about her work, and also the most wrong.