Watercolour-style tattoo on the inner wrist of a heart outline with a semicolon, in teal, green, blue and purple washes with black dots.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and semicolon watercolour wrist tattoo

Other · Colour · Photo

A heart outline with a semicolon sits on the inner wrist, drawn with a bold black line and filled with soft teal, green, blue and purple washes. Black dots and fine splatter spread out around the heart and the semicolon, giving a loose, painted feel. The colour ink dominates the composition, which is centred on the wrist against a dark background.

Other Heart Semicolon Splatter Dot

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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

You take the path past the last cottage, where the beech wood begins, carrying the paint tin Mrs Abernethy at the printworks gave you with its lid bent shut. The village behind you has one shop, one bell, and a dog that follows you as far as the stile and no further. Ahead, the trees lean over the track like neighbours listening through a wall.

Keep reading

She told you the pigments came from the wood. The blue came from the pool where the water goes green in August. The purple came from elderberries the children crush and smear across their mouths. The teal you could only mix by dipping your brush in the spring that rises under the roots of the oldest beech. She said nothing about the black, which you would have to find for yourself. You kneel at the spring, dip, and watch the water take the colour and loosen it into clouds.

The black is a dot. Every hour you have to stop and set one down, a single mark on a page of sky, and you learn that a dot is not the end of anything. It is a place where you chose to pause and then go on. By the time the light turns amber you have spattered the whole clearing with small dark stops, and the heart you traced in the moss is bleeding teal into the roots.

When the dog finally comes up the track, it sits at the stile and waits. You walk down with purple on your fingers and the half-stop still in your head, the mark that says keep reading. Behind you the wood keeps its colours. At the bottom of the hill the village bell rings once, and you lift your hand to answer it.