Colour photo of a soft-edged rainbow gradient tattoo of overlapping circles on a woman's shoulder and upper chest, with her face cropped out of frame.

Blurred rainbow gradient on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman wears a black top with a blue strap, and her face is cropped out of frame. The tattoo is a set of overlapping circles blending red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, with soft, blurred edges and no outlines. The rainbow colours fade into one another against pale skin, and the design sits on the top of the shoulder near the collarbone.

Shoulder Rainbow Gradient Circle Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third stair, there's a tread gone soft under it, and keep off the wall where the damp has got in. Now, you want the story of the window at Harrowcote. Folk call it the Prism, though nobody living can tell you why. Old Tobias Wren made it the last winter before the lord's roof gave way. He was a glazier from the coast, and he would not draw a single line on that glass. Each pane was a round of colour, and he pressed one hue into the next while the glass was still soft, so red sank into orange and orange into yellow, with no leading to say where one stopped.

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His daughter Marit swept the hall beneath it every morning for six years after he died. The lord never paid what he owed, and when the creditors came he sold the glass to a dealer from the city. Marit did not argue. She climbed the scaffold in the grey before dawn with a bucket of vinegar and a stiff brush, meaning to lift the panes out whole. But the sun rose early that morning, and when it struck the glass the colours spilled across the flagstones and up the far wall. She found she could not put a hand to it. The light would not come down in pieces.

So she stayed on the scaffold until the sun was high and the dealer's cart had rattled back down the valley empty. Then she climbed down, took her father's brush, and painted the east wall with the same soft circles, red bleeding into violet, so that whatever light came in would have somewhere to go.

When the sun comes round now, the whole east wall still goes red, then gold, then green, then that deep bruised blue, and nobody has ever found the place where one colour stops and the next begins. That was her father's trick, Marit used to say. Nothing is ever really the edge of anything. Now mind your feet going out.