Colour tattoo on a forearm showing paintbrushes, pencils, a pencil sharpener and a tube of oil paint, shown from two angles.

Art supplies on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm tattoo of artists' materials: a black-handled paintbrush with a teal-tipped brush, sharpened pencils in red, orange, yellow, black and green, a pencil sharpener with curled shavings, and a grey tube of oil paint squeezing out a magenta ribbon. The shading is smooth and three-dimensional, with soft highlights on the metal and glossy paint, and the design is shown in two photographs taken from different angles.

Neo-trad Forearm Paintbrush Pencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sharpener lived at the end of the long bench in the print room on Hallam Street, bolted down before anyone currently employed had been born. The new intake always arrived with pencils they had already ruined, points snapped on the stairs, and Stanley would take each one without a word, turning it slowly until the wood lifted away in curls. He said you could tell a student by the shavings. Careful people made long ones, the colour of marmalade peel. The rushed made crumbs.

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The autumn Nadia came, she brought a tube of oil paint she had carried from her grandmother's flat in a coat pocket, its cap rusted fast to the tin. Stanley pried it open with a butter knife. Inside, the paint had set into a stiff magenta plug. He squeezed the last of it onto a scrap of card, and it rose from the mouth of the tube like a bent ribbon, glossy and reluctant, the way it had probably risen a thousand times in a room she could no longer go back to.

She asked him whether it was still any good. He said it was the best colour he had seen all year, and that paint was only ever a promise, something left in a tube until somebody decided to make a mark. She sharpened a green pencil that afternoon, carefully, and drew the shape of the curl on the card beside it. By Christmas the bench was buried in long shavings, and the sharpener had a new name pencilled on the register beside the door: Nadia's.