Forearm tattoo of the Hogwarts crest in black linework with red, yellow, green and blue watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hogwarts crest with watercolour splashes on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large Hogwarts crest fills most of the frame, with a bold black outline and a white letter H with black shading at its centre. The inner panels of the shield are left open to loose watercolour washes in red, yellow, green and blue that bleed past the linework. The design sits on the inner forearm and is shown in a close, straight-on crop.

Forearm Crest Shield Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's only good for the front bench. It was raining the night Mabel Crane came up Cheapside with a shield under her coat, and the rain did what rain does to paint. Every colour she'd mixed ran off the board and into the gutter, red into yellow, green into the blue of the cobbles, until by the time she reached the Guildhall steps she had lost the lion, the serpent, the eagle and the badger, and was left holding nothing but a white letter H, bone dry under her collar.

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The porter at the Guildhall was a man called Ossory Vane, who had kept the key to the old glasshouse for forty years and never once opened it. He took one look at the H and went grey. 'Hollis's mark,' he said. 'Nobody's carried that since the fire.' Mabel asked him what fire. He told her the old Academy of the Four Wards had stood on the marshes until the night its founders quarrelled over who should keep the books, and the books burned, and the four colours went into the river to be drunk by eels.

They went down together into the glasshouse, where the windows still bore the four quarters, faded almost to nothing. Mabel unpacked her brushes and, because the rain had taught her something, she did not paint the shield at all. She let the water do it. She tipped a jar of wet blue onto the glass, and the black lines she had drawn rose up through the wash like something surfacing for air, and the old colours came back one by one, bleeding past the edges of the lead.

Ossory lifted the H off the glass and held it to the lamp. It was not a letter at all, he said, but a door, and the door had been waiting for someone who would stop trying to keep things dry. Outside the rain had stopped. Mabel left the window open, and somewhere beneath the cobbles, very faintly, the river began to hum in four colours.