Black outline bicycle tattoo surrounded by pink, orange, yellow, green and blue watercolour splashes on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bicycle with watercolour splashes on an arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black line drawing of a bicycle sits on the inner upper arm, with its wheels, frame and saddle clearly outlined. Behind it, loose splashes of pink, orange, yellow, green and blue ink spread outward in a soft, watercolour-like effect. The bicycle is centred on the arm against a blurred indoor background, and the bright colour contrasts with the solid black linework.

Upper arm Bicycle Paint splash Wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has taken the bicycle again, the one with the buckled front mudguard, and you are the only one who has noticed the chain wants oil. Down the lane past the cattle grid the wheels tick and whir. The bell has been silent since Easter, because the prior said a bell on a bicycle was vanity, and you have decided a squeaking pedal is only a prayer that has not yet learnt its words.

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Every Thursday you ride to the village with the eggs and the mended altar linen, and every Thursday you stop at the bridge where the Usk runs the colour of weak tea. That was where the trouble started. Your paint box rides in the saddlebag, wrapped in a tea towel: six cakes of cheap pan colour that Sister Hild bought at the market and never opened. You prop the bicycle against the parapet, wet the brush on your tongue the way your mother did, and let pink bleed into the water, then orange, then a green that will not sit still.

The splashes do not stay on the paper. When you get home there is a smear of yellow on the handlebar grip and blue on the inside of your wrist, and the frame, drawn in black ink, has spokes that fan out in colour as if someone had flung a jar across the page. Sister Hild sees it first and says nothing, which is how you know it is good.

On Tuesday the prior asks, very carefully, whether the bicycle might take him to the chapter house. He stands at the stable door a long time, hands inside his sleeves, looking at the picture pinned to the wall. Then he takes the saddle, and you hear the chain begin to sing.