Bold black Deathly Hallows symbol, a triangle with a circle and vertical line, over soft rainbow watercolour-style washes on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deathly Hallows symbol with rainbow wash on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold black outline of the Deathly Hallows symbol, a triangle enclosing a circle with a vertical line through it, sits centrally on the forearm. Behind the black linework, loose brush-like washes in pink, purple, blue, green, yellow and red fade out at the edges. The design is centred on a plain skin background with a blue covering visible at the edges of the frame.

Geometric Forearm Deathly hallows Triangle Circle Rainbow Brush stroke Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobias,

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The abbot found the page this morning, the one with three shapes I drew in the margin of the psalter. He held it up to the window and said nothing for so long that the bell for Terce rang before he spoke. He did not scold me. He asked whether the circle was meant to be closed or whether I had simply lost my nerve at the join, and I could not tell him which it was.

I had only wanted to see the thing as a brush would see it. Black ink for the bones of the figure: the triangle with its hard angle, the upright line through the ring. Once the ink had dried, I used the colours I had been grinding for the Easter initials all winter. Madder for the rose, woad for the blue, weld for the yellow that makes green when you mix it with the woad. I laid them on wet and let them run out past the edges, because a wash that stops at the line looks like a painted tile, and I wanted the colour to keep going after the ink had stopped.

Brother Anselm says it is vanity. Perhaps it is. But the rain has come off the fens all week and the cloister roof leaks over the gospel desk, and when I look at the page the colours have already begun to bleed into one another while the black has not moved at all. I suppose that is what I was trying to tell you before you left for the coast: keep the hard edges, and let the colour go wherever it likes.

Your friend in the scriptorium, Edwin