Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a DNA double helix and a labelled chemical structure on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

DNA helix and molecule with watercolour splashes

Calf · Colour · Photo

A black double helix runs vertically through the centre of the design, with a chemical structure diagram below it, labelled with HO and NH2 groups. Bold black outlines define the helix and the molecule, while loose rainbow washes of pink, orange, green, blue and yellow drip behind and through them. The subject sits centrally on a smooth expanse of skin against a dark teal background.

Calf Chemical structure Molecule Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyer's widow at Little Wenning kept her colours in brown stoneware jars along the back wall of the shop, and in the hard winter of 1953 she was asked to dye a thing nobody in the valley had seen before. The man from the college came up on the Tuesday bus with a roll of graph paper under his arm. He unrolled it on her counter, weighted the corners with two tins of mordant and a clay pipe, and showed her a twisted ladder drawn in pencil, its rungs marked with small letters, and below it a ring of carbon bones with hooks of oxygen sticking out like handles.

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She asked what it was for. He said it was the shape of what a family passes down, the letters that tell a child whether its hair will curl or its blood will run thin. She said that was a lot to ask of a dye vat. He laughed, then stopped laughing, because she had already taken down the madder and the woad and was lining them up in the order they bled into one another.

For three weeks she worked in the back room with the window shut against the frost. She wound the ladder in two strands, one indigo and one the soft brown of wet bread, and let the rungs go unfinished where the wool would not take. Around the bones she splashed what was left from the church fête banners: pink from a wedding, orange from the harvest supper, a green that had been bought for the bowling club and never used. Where the colours ran together they made a sort of weather.

When he came back in spring he held the skein up to the window and found the ladder still there, plain as a stair, with the colour dripping off its lowest rung into the ring of bones. He asked her what it meant. She said it meant the wool had been left out in the rain, and the rain had been kind. Then she cut a length of the bowling club green and knotted it round his wrist, because it had been paid for and she was not one to waste a good dye.