Close-up of an abstract tattoo of black and red brushstrokes sweeping across a bare shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract brushstroke tattoo on a shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A bare shoulder and upper back are shown against a plain pale wall. The tattoo is made of thick black strokes tapering to points, with thinner black lines and softer red wash strokes crossing over the top of the shoulder and down towards the collarbone. The colour is saturated against the pale skin, and the composition leaves most of the frame as empty wall.

Shoulder Brushstroke Abstract Shoulder

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Aldric has told you three times that the stroke must be finished in one breath, and three times you have lifted the brush too early, so the black runs out thin and grey at its tail like a candle guttering in a draught. Lauds has long since finished. The cold rises through the flagstones of the scriptorium and into your knees, and the vellum before you holds nothing but the ruled lines of a psalm heading, waiting for its colour.

Keep reading

He takes the brush from your hand without a word. It is the large one, a goose quill bound with badger hair, and he dips it in the soot ink you ground yesterday until the tip hangs heavy and black. He does not look at the page. He draws from the left, pressing so the hair bellies out, then lightening so the point leaves the parchment clean as a swallow leaving water. Then he takes the finest quill, dips it in the vermilion jar, and lays two red strokes beneath the black, quick and dry.

"That is the wind," he says. "Not the bird. Never paint the bird." You want to ask what the difference is, but the question sits in your throat like a fishbone, and he is already reaching for the next sheet.

Years later you will stand at the lectern while a novice shakes over a fresh page, and you will say the same thing to him. You will not be sure you understand it. But when you lift the brush at last, the black stroke leaves the vellum without a single grey thread at its end, and behind you the old chair creaks, as if someone had been listening all along.