Colourful abstract tattoo of a DNA double helix with black brushstrokes and red, yellow, green and teal splashes on the inner forearm.

DNA helix forearm tattoo with watercolour splashes

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A double helix runs up the forearm, drawn with loose black brushstrokes and short horizontal rungs. Colour washes in red, yellow, green and teal bleed around the strands, with scattered black dots and splatters adding movement. The composition is vertical and open, with the helix widening towards the top of the arm and the colour fading out at the edges.

Forearm Brushstroke Splashes Dot Abstract

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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 ink in the vat has gone tacky again, and Mr Oduya is shouting from the far end of the Calder Street print works that the run has to be on the lorry by five. You wipe your hands on the rag in your back pocket and lean over the teal. The sodium lamps outside throw orange stripes through the high windows and across the concrete, like the rungs of a ladder someone has half rubbed out.

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Your grandmother used to say the city was a ladder somebody had dropped, and every rung landed in a different postcode. You never believed her. Tonight you believe a little more, because the sample sheet in your hand shows two strands twisting upward in red and green, and the wet teal keeps sliding off the page toward the drain. You add a drop of yellow, then a drop of black, then stop, because the mix has started to look like the bridge over the canal where the graffiti crew painted the same spiral last spring.

At two in the morning you take the sheet out onto the loading dock. A fox crosses the car park with something pale in its mouth. Across the water, somebody has painted the spiral again, fresher this time, its black rungs dragged downward by a hand that clearly never stopped to measure. You lean on the rail, watch the colour run, and realise the mix is only wrong if you expect it to stay put.

Back inside, you pour the batch as it is. Mr Oduya never asks what it's called. The lorry leaves at five with a hundred tins labelled Canal Teal, and on the motorway out of town you can see the spiral on the bridge, leaning over the water as if it were reaching for the lights.