Colourful abstract watercolour-style tattoo across the inner forearm, with blue, pink, purple, red and green washes and paint splatters.

Abstract splash tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm is shown against a textured cream wall, with a wide band of loose, painterly shapes running across the skin. The marks are soft-edged washes and fine splatters in blue, magenta, violet, red and green, with a small dark burst near the centre. The colour is dense and vivid, and the composition is an open, unframed sweep that wraps across the arm.

Forearm Abstract Paint splatter Brushstroke Wash Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spill came down the Wenning on a wet Tuesday in March, and by the time the bells at St Brannock's rang noon the whole estuary had gone the colour of a bruise that hadn't decided what it wanted to be. Nobody in Porthgarrow blamed Ada Pellow. She had only left the vat lids off to cool the madder, and the rain did the rest, spilling indigo from the shed, red from the copper troughs and a green like pond weed where the mordant met the tide.

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By noon the fishing boats were coming in streaked like painted eggs. Ada's grandson Tobias ran down the slipway with a jam jar and a borrowed brush, dabbing at the shallows as if he could lift the colour off the water with a bristle. Mr Quiller, the harbourmaster, leaned on the rail with his pipe going out and told him the sea would rinse it pale by Saturday. He was half right. The open water took the worst of it, but the eddies behind the sluice gate held onto their washes, blue curling into violet, magenta bleeding out in soft feathers, and a red seam that would not lie flat.

The children of the town spent the whole Easter holiday on the wall with paper and paint, trying to catch the way the colour slid and splintered where the current hit the stones. Tobias filled his jar from the sluice every morning and set it on the windowsill, and every evening the water had turned a little more like a dusk over the moor.

By June the tide had carried the last of it past the breakwater, and the sluice stones were grey again. Ada kept the jar on her sill regardless. Each spring, when the rain came off the hills, she unscrewed the lid and let a little of the river in, and watched it bloom in the glass as if it had only been waiting for someone to look.