Black ink drawing of a yin yang symbol with melting, dripping ink running down from the dark half, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dripping yin yang symbol

Black and grey · Flash

A yin yang symbol drawn as a black outline circle with the dark half melting into drips that run down the lower edge. The dripping shape has two small white highlight holes near the top, giving it a face-like look. The design is shown flat on a plain white background, centred in the frame.

Yin yang Drip Ink Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall at Hollins still smelled of floor polish, and the sausage rolls had gone cold on the same trestle table where Mr Oakes once stacked his paint pots. I found Priya Lall by the window, holding a paper cup of squash as if it might make a break for it. 'You still owe me a bottle of Indian ink,' she said, before hello.

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It was the spring of 1998. We'd been set a balance study for art, and we decided the dark half of the circle should look like it was melting. So we tipped the bottle over the lino, tilted the easel, and watched the ink find its own way towards the edge. Oakes didn't laugh. He made us scrub the floor with turps on our knees while the rest of the class got on with their still lifes, and the drips that ran off the bottom never quite came out of the grout.

Priya pulled a folded menu card from her bag. On the back was a ring drawn in pencil, the dark half running into neat ribbons down the lower edge, and two small white dots near the top where she'd lifted the ink with a cotton bud. 'I've been doing this one for twenty-six years,' she said. 'Every time I get a new pen, I try to make the drips look like they happened by accident. The holes were always the bit I got wrong. Too round. Oakes would have hated them.'

I looked across the room at the scrubbed patch by the door, still faintly grey under the strip lights, and understood that she had spent most of her life trying to make a mistake look deliberate. I finished my squash. 'I'll pay you back for the ink,' I said. She shrugged and tucked the card away. 'Leave the floor,' she said. 'It's the only bit of the school that's still honest.'