Forearm tattoo of a figure in a bowler hat with a small moustache, surrounded by black dots and blue watercolour-style splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bowler hat portrait with blue watercolour splashes

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black ink portrait of a figure wearing a bowler hat, with a small moustache and wide, round eyes, sits on the forearm. Black dots and soft blue and teal splashes with dripping ink trails surround the head, mixing dotwork texture with a loose watercolour effect. The composition is centred on the face and hat, with the splashes fading out toward the edges of the arm.

Dotwork Forearm Moustache Portrait Dot Splash Watercolour Ink drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The decree against colour arrived on the same morning as the rain, and in Ostrevel nobody could decide which was the greater trespass. I was a clerk in the Royal Counting House, which meant I counted things that had no need of counting: the drops on the palace roof, the specks of dust on the king's ledgers, the number of times the Chancellor sneezed in a sitting. My bowler was black and stiff and had belonged to my uncle, who said a hat that keeps its shape is a hat that keeps its owner's dignity.

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The trouble began with the ink-sellers. Madame Oriel, who sold indigo from a cart beside the fish market, refused to surrender her barrels. She emptied a bucket over the Chancellor's carriage instead, and the blue ran down the lacquered panels in long fingers. The guards slipped, the horses bolted, and by evening the whole square looked like a bruised sky someone had shaken out. I stood under the drips with my hat held over my heart and counted nineteen dots of blue on the brim before the ink reached my collar.

They dragged me before the king to answer for the splash. He was a small man who kept a pocket-watch the size of a cabbage, and he asked me, very seriously, how many drops I had counted. "Nineteen, Majesty," I said. "And how many were your own?" he asked. I looked at my cuffs, the only clean thing I owned. "None," I said. He laughed until the watch stopped, and that afternoon he pardoned the ink-sellers, the rain and me, and ordered a blue ribbon sewn round every clerk's hat in the kingdom.

I still wear mine. When it rains in Ostrevel, the children run out into the square to count the drops falling on my brim, and they never once get the same number twice.