Fine black outline of a colour swatch with the word TATTONE and the code 5K1 N, tattooed on the back of a wrist, styled like a paint chip.

Colour swatch tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand and wrist with a small rectangular swatch tattooed on the back of the wrist. The swatch is drawn in thin black linework, with a lower panel labelled TATTONE and 5K1 N in simple sans-serif capitals, and the upper panel left as unshaded skin. The plain background and soft light keep the focus on the tattoo, and a thin metal ring is visible on one finger.

Fine line Hand Rectangle Text Outline

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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

The man from the council wanted grey, the same grey as the ferry hall before the damp got into it, and he would not accept that no grey was ever the same grey twice. Harriet Oake let him argue. She had run the mixing counter at Dunmore's Hardware on Cross Street for thirty-one years, and she had learned that customers arguing with a fan deck were easier than customers arguing with the weather. She kept the swatch cards in a shoebox under the till, because the schoolchildren nicked them otherwise.

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The card that mattered was older than the shop's current stock. Her uncle had left it in a drawer with his pipe tobacco and a receipt for a sack of lime. It had a small pale rectangle printed at the top, the colour of a clean tooth, and below it a black band with a code in pencil: 5K1 N. The top panel was blank card, just the stock showing through. Nobody in the trade could say what it was. The supplier in Bradford sent a letter saying the number had been retired in 1971, and that was the end of the matter for everyone except Harriet, who spent most of a decade trying to mix it from memory and from the grain of her own kitchen wall.

In March a girl came in with a crumpled drawing of a kitchen and asked for "the colour you can't quite see yet". Harriet did not laugh. She went to the back, measured out white and a single drop of cream, stirred it for longer than was needed, and poured it into a clean tin. She wrote 5K1 N on the lid in pencil and handed it across the counter. The girl held it up to the window, nodded once, and paid in coins. Harriet sat down on the stool behind the till and found that her hands were shaking, because for the first time the blank panel and the paint matched exactly.