Painterly DNA double helix tattoo in orange, red and yellow with blue and yellow dots on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

DNA helix on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A double helix runs vertically down the forearm, drawn as loose, sketchy strands with several crossing rungs. The linework is soft and feathered, and the strands shift between orange, red and yellow, with small blue, yellow and red dots scattered along the rungs and around the outside of the design. The arm fills most of the frame against a crumpled, reflective plastic background.

Forearm Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Carrow had been at the kitchen table since first light, a magnifying lamp pulled close and a saucer of wheat grains at her elbow. Frost had furred the inside of the window. Her brother's tin of seed packets sat open beside the kettle, the labels curled at the corners, the handwriting leaning left the way their mother's had.

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The grains were the colour of rust with a yellow bloom along the crease, and when she turned one with the tweezers she could see the fine ridge down its side twist once, then again, like rope someone had been careful with. Their grandfather had crossed the red Ember wheat with a pale Essex strain in 1931 and kept a ledger of every cross and every failure. The last entry said the line had been lost in a flood. Ruth had never believed the ledger.

She counted out forty grains onto a square of muslin and, on the back of an envelope, tallied the tiny dark freckles that broke the husk. They came in pairs along the seam. Four pairs. She laughed out loud at the empty kitchen, because it was only a wheat, and then she stopped laughing, because it was exactly the sort of thing their grandfather would have hidden in plain sight.

In March, when the top field thawed to brown porridge, she walked out with the muslin in her coat pocket and sowed the grains by hand, her arm swinging wide, red seed flicking against the wet earth. Crows followed her to the hedge. By June the first ears stood shoulder high, and when she rubbed one between her palms the chaff fell away in small coloured flecks, like something spilled from a paint box. She stood there a long while, reading it.