Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of an outlined heart with a treble clef and music notes on an upper arm.

Heart and treble clef with watercolour drips on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A heart outline containing a treble clef and musical notes sits at the top of the design, with the linework in grey and black. Below it, blue, pink, green and purple watercolour-style splashes and drips run down the arm, with more treble clefs and notes scattered through the colour. The tattoo fills the upper arm and shoulder area against a plain teal top.

Upper arm Shoulder Heart Treble clef Music note Watercolour splash

Find an artist for this

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 are sixteen the summer the paint tins go over. Your uncle Rob is repainting the roof of the narrowboat Marjorie at the lock, sanding the grey bitumen until the sun comes through in patches, and you are holding the hymnbook because he insists a man should not paint without music. The hymnbook was your Aunt Ida's. Her handwriting runs down the margins, little clefs and quavers she drew to keep herself awake through sermons.

Keep reading

The wind takes the book first, then the lid of the blue tin, then the pink, and the cut drinks them both. You watch a page of her hymns go under like a leaf, and the colours bloom on the surface, green, then violet, sliding in long threads past the gunwale. Rob says nothing. He sits down on the cabin step with the brush across his knees and starts humming the tune that was on the page you lost, getting the wrong notes in the right places.

By evening the paint has dried in streaks down the side of the boat, and the roof has the look of a sky that couldn't make up its mind. You walk back to the lock with a torch and find that the drips have found the rivets and followed them, blue and rose, like a hand that never stops to lift the pen.

Rob never repainted the roof. He said the canal had signed it. Some mornings, when the sun sits low on the water, you still hear him whistling the missing tune, and you can nearly believe the notes are running down the hull.