Colour tattoo on a forearm of a small climbing figure on a rope, surrounded by blue and green watercolour washes, with the hand raised against a blurred green background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Climber and watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small figure in red and pink clothing climbs a rope or pole, drawn with clean outlines and simple detail. Loose blue, teal and green watercolour washes spread around the figure and along the forearm, with the paint fading at the edges. The arm is raised against a softly blurred outdoor background of trees.

Forearm Rope Figure Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell had the rope off its hook before the kettle was on, because the tide had gone further out than anyone at Seaview could remember, and the bell buoy off Gull Head had stopped ringing. Her grandson Tobias was somewhere on the rocks below the cliff, chasing a brass lamp he had seen wash up in the bladderwrack the afternoon before. He was eleven. He believed whatever the sea told him.

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She tied the rope to the iron ring by the back step. It was old hemp, stiff with salt, and it had hung in the washhouse since the Harrowby girl came down the cliff in the great storm with a tin of pilchards and no memory of why she had gone up. Mrs Pell did not look down. She went over the edge hand over hand, her boots finding the knots her mother had worked into the face of the rock, and the wind pushed at her back like someone wanting her to hurry.

Tobias was on a shelf of stone with the lamp in his lap, dry as a biscuit and humming. The water below was the colour of thin ink washed over with blue, and where the weed hung it turned green. "The tide's turning," she said. "I know," he said. "That's why I waited." He held out the lamp. It had a cracked glass and a sprig of samphire wedged in the spout, and it had belonged, he told her, to the lodger who used to sleep in the attic and sketch the gulls. He had gone out one morning and never come back for it.

They climbed together, the rope groaning, the sea lifting and falling under them like breath. At the top Mrs Pell set the lamp on the sill of the back window, where it has stayed. Nobody has lit it. By morning the water had drawn a fine line of silt up the back step, neat as a tide mark on a cuff, and the rope lay coiled beside the door, wet and patient, ready for the next time someone was foolish enough to look down.