Two forearms, one with a red, green and blue overlapping circle tattoo and the other with a red, blue and yellow version, both on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching three-circle colour diagrams on forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown crossing, each with a small tattoo of three overlapping filled circles. The left design uses red, green and blue, while the right uses pink, teal and yellow, with overlaps creating secondary colours. The solid colour fills are crisp against the skin, and the simple, centred composition keeps the two designs clearly separate.

Forearm Circle Overlapping circles

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Wilf,

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The fair pulled onto Harrow Common on Tuesday, and Mr Peck has finally let me near the paint. He keeps the big pots of primaries in the back of the dodgem wagon, labelled in his terrible capitals, and when nobody was looking I took the red, the green and the blue and put them in an old jam jar with a splash of water. You'd have laughed. The jar went cloudy and then, slowly, a sort of brown.

Then Mrs Quill, who paints the horses, came round the back with her tea and showed me the trick her mother taught her. Don't mix the paints, she said, lay them over each other like panes of glass. Red over green gives you yellow where they meet, which I'd have sworn was impossible. Blue over red gives a purple you could hang on a wall. So I drew three circles on a bit of cardboard, one for each colour, and let them overlap, and the middle went a grey-white where all three sat together.

The lads on the rides think I'm soft. Perhaps I am. But I've made two sheets of this now, one for you and one for me, and I've picked the colours so the second set is the first turned inside out: pink, teal and yellow, the shades you get when the light is taken away rather than added. Mrs Quill says that's the difference between a rainbow and a printing press.

We leave for Dunmere on Saturday. Post your reply care of the fair, and bring your cardboard when you come up at Easter, because I want to see whether your middle circle comes out the same colour as mine.

Love, Ada