Close-up of a fine line black and grey tattoo of a paint swatch card reading TATTONE 5K1 N on the upper arm, beneath a grey sleeve.

Colour swatch tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outlined tattoo of a paint colour swatch card sits on the outer upper arm, with a white label reading TATTONE and 5K1 N in black print. The thin black linework is clean and uniform, with the white panel left as bare skin. The cropped photo shows the arm against a grey sleeve, with the subject's face out of frame.

Fine line Upper arm Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The colourman came up the valley road the week before the wedding, his cart rattling with tins and his fan of paper cards held under one arm like a hymnbook. Edith Harrow stood at the lych gate with her arms folded and would not let him through until he had shown her the one she wanted. He had a card for every shade a village could need. Oak gall, bramble, the grey of a wet slate roof. He flicked through them with his thumb and said they were all the same colour under different names, which is the sort of thing a man says when he has never had to match a bride's sash to a barn door.

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She wanted a shade that was not in the cart. Her son Walter was to marry the Pell girl on Saturday, and the Pells had sent word that their colour, the green of the river at dusk, must be on the sash or there would be no wedding at all. Edith had heard this sort of talk before, from her own mother, and she knew the Pells had never once been right about anything except the price of eggs.

The colourman took a stub of pencil from behind his ear, drew a small square on the back of her palm, and pressed a fingertip into the wet ink to show her the colour. He named it with a number and a letter, as if it were a bus or a gravestone. Edith laughed at him, sent him down to the dyer's, and paid him in cold pork.

On Saturday the sash was green as river water, and the Pell girl wept into her veil, and the colourman was never seen in the valley again. Years later Walter found a folded card wedged inside the family Bible. The white label had gone the colour of weak tea, but the print still read TATTONE and, underneath, 5K1 N, and the bare square beside it had been left empty for someone to match.