Watercolour style tattoo of a figure holding a blue umbrella, with rainbow paint drips running down, on the forearm.

Figure under a blue umbrella with paint drips

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dark silhouette of a figure in a knee-length dress or coat stands beneath a large blue umbrella, with the figure's head partly hidden by the umbrella's underside. Soft blue washes, splashes and vertical drips in green, pink, orange and yellow run down from the umbrella and around the figure, giving a loose painterly effect. The tattoo sits centrally on a lower arm against a dark leather background.

Forearm Figure Umbrella Rain Silhouette Watercolour Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways off the firth the morning the Brightwater failed to come home, and by nine the whole quay had gone the grey of wet slate. My mother was already standing by the fish market with her blue umbrella, the one with the bent rib she refused to have fixed. A crooked umbrella, she said, keeps the weather honest. She had not slept and neither had I.

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Nobody sent word. Boats came in on the tide, or they didn't, and the only news was a crackle from the harbour radio and women standing at the bollards with their hands in their pockets. Mother did not join them. She kept her place near the ice house, the umbrella tilted low, and watched the water go from pewter to black. Diesel rainbows slid across the cobbles at her feet. Gulls screamed over the bins as if they had been promised something.

Just after noon the Brightwater's engine came round the headland, rough and slow, one hull listing a little to starboard. Mother tipped the umbrella back. The rain ran down its ribs in long ribbons, green and then pink and then a sour orange where the light caught them, and she let them run over the back of her hand without wiping them away. My father stood on the deck with a bandaged head and raised one arm, as if he were only hailing a taxi.

She did not run. She folded the umbrella with a snap, walked down the slipway with the rain on her shoulders, and at the bottom step she opened it again, high and deliberate, so he would see exactly where she was standing. Thirty years on, the bent rib still clicks when I open it, and I still hear that click as the sound of a promise kept.