Geometric tattoo of a row of ten colour blocks in a black outlined rectangle, shown on the inner forearm.

Colour swatch bar on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A horizontal rectangle with a bold black outline is divided into ten equal blocks, shaded from black through brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and grey to white. The blocks are filled with solid flat colour with slight variation in tone, and the outline is crisp and even. The tattoo sits centrally on the inner forearm against a plain, softly blurred background.

Geometric Forearm Rectangle Rainbow Outline

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ten blocks, Nell, and not one of them is allowed to be a guess. Black first, because black is where every dye starts and where it ends if you let it go slack. Then the browns, which are liars. The red that turns orange after dark, the yellow that goes sickly green under the gas. Say them back to me the way my father taught me, left to right, and don't look at the card while you do it.

Keep reading

She said them. The card had hung above the vat-house door at Hebden Bridge since before the war, painted by hand on a board that smelled of indigo, and the last square had always been the hardest. Off-white, the colour of wool before the scour, and nobody agreed on it. Abel Stott had never once got it right first time, but he had never got it wrong twice either.

That winter his eyes went milky at the edges, and he would hold a skein to the window and shake his head at it. One morning he handed me the card and asked me to cover the last block with my thumb. I mixed lime and rag-water in a cracked saucer until I had something near the paper, and he pressed his face close and said, grey. I said it was the white. He laughed so hard the foreman came out of the drying loft to see what the matter was. He had not been able to tell grey from white since Michaelmas. He had been reading the card by its order, the way I was now reading it by its order, and neither of us had known.

I pin the card back above the door every morning now, black on the left where it belongs. Before I unlock the vats I say the ten names out loud to the empty room, the way you'd haul a rope hand over hand, and I never once say the last one as though I am sure of it.