Colour tattoo of a vintage camera with a black lens, orange ring and watercolour splashes in green, blue and red, on the forearm.

Camera with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black linework drawing of a vintage camera sits on the forearm, with its round lens filled in solid black and outlined in orange. Dark hatched shading and sketchy strokes give the camera depth, while loose watercolour-style washes of green, blue, yellow and red bleed out around it and run down beneath the design. Colour ink dominates the composition, which is centred on the forearm against a plain pale background.

Forearm Camera Lens Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Kodak Retina had been dead for three years when Maud finally pried the back off it on the kitchen table, the way you'd open a letter you already knew the bad news in. Inside, a roll of film had been wound tight and forgotten, its paper backing gone the colour of weak tea. She carried it to the chemist on Hollis Street, where Mr Okafor held it up to the window like a jeweller checking a stone and said, with a sort of reverence, that nobody brought him these any more.

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He developed it in the back room with the radio on. Maud waited on a stool beside a rack of hanging negatives that looked like strips of burnt sky. Twelve frames. Most were blurred, a thumb across the lens, a sea of coats. But the sixth was sharp. A pier, a bench, a woman in a yellow mac turning round as if someone had called her name. Maud had no memory of taking it. She had no memory of the woman either, though the mac was hers, and so was the bench's green paint, and so, she realised, was the hand that had held the shutter open.

She paid for the prints and walked the long way home, letting the rain run off the brim of her hat. Somewhere near the market she stopped and tipped the photograph to the light. The yellow of the mac had bled into the paper at the edges, the way ink does when a page gets wet, and the sea behind her had gone blue and green and streaked down toward the bottom of the frame like paint that could not decide where to stop. She kept walking, holding it out in front of her, and for the first time in three years she didn't feel the need to put the camera down.