Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a city skyline with a suspension bridge and tall skyscrapers on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

City skyline with bridge on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A city skyline with a suspension bridge on the left and several tall skyscrapers, one with a spire, is tattooed across the forearm. The black silhouette is softened by pink, violet and blue washes that fade and drip downwards into the base of the design. The tattoo is shown in colour on pale skin, set against a red fabric background.

Forearm Skyline City Bridge Skyscraper

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bridge was the first thing my brother drew on the back of a packing crate, before the spires, before he knew what the spires would cost him. From the third rung of the orchard ladder you could see it on a clear September evening, a grey hook of cables slung across the water and, beyond it, the teeth of the city turning pink where the sun caught the glass.

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Dad said the orchard would keep him honest. Every August we picked the Discovery apples before the wasps got drunk on them, and every August Tom looked up at the haze over the river and counted buildings like sheep. He left the week after the last pick, with a rucksack and two Cox's Orange Pippins wrapped in a tea towel, and a promise to ring on Sundays.

The calls came on Sundays for a year, then on the first Sunday of the month, then the phone went straight to a voicemail with a train announcement behind it. I kept the ladder up. Each evening I climbed to the third rung and searched for the bridge, sure I could pick out a lit window that might be his, the colours running down over the river until the orchard and the city bled together like wet paint.

Last week a parcel came from London with no note. Inside was a folded sheet: the same bridge, the same spire, drawn in ink and washed over with pink and blue, and a line at the bottom in his handwriting. Come and see it from the ground. I took the ladder down, pulled on my boots and walked out between the rows, where the windfalls were already soft in the grass.