Black lettering quote and a dopamine molecule drawing with blue, yellow and purple watercolour splashes, tattooed on an upper thigh.

Dopamine molecule and two lines of lettering on thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two lines of black handwritten-style capitals reading IT'S NOT ABOUT FORCING HAPPINESS and IT'S ABOUT NOT LETTING SADNESS WIN, with a benzene ring drawn in fine black linework labelled HO, HO and NH2. Blue, yellow and purple watercolour splashes surround the molecule and text, adding soft colour to the otherwise dark lettering. The design is centred on the outer thigh and fills most of the frame against a plain light background.

Lettering Thigh Quote Lettering Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Ackroyd had run the colour bench at the Armley dyeworks since before decimal coinage, and she had no patience for young men who stood at the window with their hands in their pockets. "Sighing won't mix the vat, Tomasz," she said, and pushed a jam jar of pale yellow powder across the bench. "Weigh me out forty grams. Count it aloud if you have to."

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He did as he was told, lips moving, the scoop trembling a little. Thursday rain ran down the skylight in grey ropes. Pinned to the cork board above the bench was the diagram she had drawn herself decades back, a six-sided ring with two small HO flags off the top and a tail ending in NH2, the little arrangement that made the good tints bite into cloth. "Every blue on this wall came from that ring," she said. "Not the clever blue. The honest kind, which holds through the wash."

He asked what it was for, the molecule, and she told him it was a messenger. The body sent it out to say keep going, and some days the message got lost on the road, so you had to be the one who stirred the vat anyway. "Nobody forces a colour to take," she said. "You just don't walk away from the bucket."

At closing she found his brush had slipped, and a spatter of ochre had spread across the page of the ledger. She didn't wipe it. She wrote the weight beside the date, forty grams exactly, then underneath in neat capitals: SADNESS DOES NOT GET THE LAST STIR. She locked the ledger in the drawer for Monday.