Colour tattoo of a heart-shaped artist's palette with a paintbrush on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart-shaped paint palette on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A heart-shaped artist's palette with dabs of pink, purple, yellow, orange, green and blue paint, with a paintbrush whose silver ferrule and red handle pass through the thumb hole. The palette has a dark outline and soft, blended shading within the paint blobs, and a red brush tail extends below it. Colour ink dominates against the pale skin, and the design sits diagonally across the forearm.

Forearm Paintbrush Heart

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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

Mrs Okonedo has brought the palette with her, the same heart-shaped board she carried down the corridor of Ashgrove Secondary every Thursday, and she sets it on the trestle table beside the sausage rolls as if it were a centrepiece. You recognise it before you recognise her. The brown wood has gone grey around the thumb hole, and the paint has dried into a crust of colours nobody has squeezed out in twenty years: the pink like cough sweets, the green like a tennis ball, the blue that always got on your sleeve.

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She taps the red brush handle where it pokes through the hole and says the whole year group still owes her a painting. You were the one who never finished, the one who swapped your canvas for a bet with Danny Price about who could draw a horse with its legs right. You start to apologise. She waves that away. She isn't waiting for an apology, she says, she's waiting for the picture, and she slides a blank card across the table with a pencil already laid on top of it.

So you sit. Around you the hall gets louder, someone's cousin starts karaoke, the urn clicks off. You draw the palette first because it's easiest, its heart shape, then the dabs of paint, the brush threaded through the hole as if it had always belonged there. When you look up she has a smear of pink on her fingertip and is pressing it onto your sleeve the way she used to, laughing at the mess.

Under the paint, in pencil so faint it could be rubbed out, you have drawn the thing you never finished: a horse with all four legs right this time, trotting off the edge of the card towards the door.