Colourful abstract tattoo of stylised figures in loose sketched black lines and watercolour-style washes of red, orange, green and turquoise, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract watercolour figures on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo of stylised, abstract figures drawn in thin, loose black linework. The shapes are filled with watercolour-like washes of red, orange, green, turquoise and pink, with scattered dots and a small leaf-like form near the bottom. The image is a close crop against a plain grey wall, with the colour and linework filling most of the frame.

Forearm Figure Abstract Watercolour Dot Brushstroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came over the pass before the mules were unloaded, so Tomas tore a page from my sketchbook and wrapped the cheese in it. I had been drawing the travellers all morning: a woman in a green shawl, two priests arguing over the price of salt, a boy with a dog that would not stop sneezing. I drew them fast in black ink, the lines loose enough that they could walk off the page if they wanted. Then I dipped my brush in whatever colour the paints had left and washed it over them.

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My father said a drawing with no weight to it would blow off the hill. He was half right. The washes ran when the damp rolled up from the valley, orange bleeding into red, turquoise pooling where two figures leaned together, and by evening the shapes had softened into something you could not quite name. The people still stood. The black dots I scattered on their coats stayed exactly where I had placed them, even when the paper went soft as bread.

The winter Tomas went up the north face for the goats and did not come down by dark, I took the sketchbook to the hut window and drew him again. Thin lines, one arm raised, a leaf-shaped scrap of cloth caught on his shoulder the way it had been that morning. I laid green over his coat and a rose-pink wash across the ground beneath him, and then I waited for the weather to get into it.

It did not come. The snow stopped at midnight, and at first light a lantern moved along the ridge, slow and steady, right where the pink had pooled. I still have the page. The colours have run into one another, but the figure is standing up straight, and the paper is dry.