A gloved tattooist uses a machine to add a red, orange and yellow watercolour-style floral tattoo to a forearm.

Colourful floral tattoo being inked on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tattooist in white gloves works with a tattoo machine on a person's forearm, with a second gloved hand stretching the skin. The design is loose and painterly, with red, orange and yellow flower-like shapes and sweeping red linework over a wooden work surface. The ink is bright and multicoloured, and the photograph is taken close up from above.

Forearm Flower Abstract shape Tattoo machine Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The madder had come up thin that spring, so Ada Penrose went down to the river meadow with a trug and a bad knee and dug for every root she could find. Her brother kept shouting from the back step that the ground was too wet for it, and he was right, but the dye pots at Sheepcote Mill had been cold since February and the order from the tailor in Halifax was due on Friday.

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She boiled the roots down in the copper until the water turned the colour of a split lip. Red, then orange where the steam thinned it, then a yellow that looked like first light through a curtain. She laid lengths of cloth in it and lifted them out dripping, and the flowers came up out of the weave the way they do when you have stopped trying to make them. Nobody had taught her to paint. She had only learned to wait.

On Friday the tailor's boy came up the lane with his cap in his hands and said the master wanted the red for a wedding dress, the true red, the kind that would not fade in the wash. Ada gave him the bolt and kept the offcut, a strip no wider than a finger, which she folded into her apron pocket without thinking.

Years later her brother found it there, pressed flat and stiff as paper, still faintly stained at the edges. He held it to the window and said it looked like a flame that had decided to be a flower. She told him that was the only honest way a colour ever got made.