Colour tattoo of a vintage camera with a blue eye as the lens and rainbow film strips over watercolour splashes, on the outer thigh.

Camera with blue eye on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A vintage film camera has a detailed blue eye in place of the lens, with rainbow film strips curling behind and below it. The camera body is shaded in grey and black, while the film strips and background splashes use bright watercolour-style washes that run down the lower edge. The design fills the thigh with a central, slightly angled composition.

Thigh Camera Eye Lens Watercolour splash Rainbow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lens cap had carried a painted blue eye since the week her father left for the mainland, and Edie had never got round to scraping it off. Tonight she held the camera steady over the sink in the darkroom above Sheard's Print Shop, counting the seconds under her breath the way he used to, while the red safelight buzzed like a trapped wasp.

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The developer had been mixed too warm. She could smell it, sharp and sweet, and she knew the film would come out with a rainbow bloom along the edges, the kind that made customers at the front counter tut and then ask for another roll anyway. She lifted the spool from the tank and unwound it into the rinse, feeling each frame slide cold through her fingers. Strips of green and orange hung drying from the clothes line, bright as boiled sweets, and the splashes of colour across the wet paper looked as if someone had flicked paint at the sea.

Her father had called the camera a window that could keep things. He had photographed the lifeboat crew, the fish market on its wet cobbles, the tide coming over the slipway on the morning he went. She had not looked at those pictures in years. Now she pinned the first frame to the line with a wooden peg and held it up to the bulb. The harbour wall was there, and the gulls, and at the bottom edge a small figure with a canvas bag over one shoulder, turning to look back at the lens.

Edie did not print it. She wiped her hands on her apron, took the paint-stained cap from the bench and screwed it back onto the camera, the blue eye facing the door. Some windows, she decided, were better left open.