Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of an orange sun with black linework and blue, green and purple splashes on a person's upper back.

Orange sunburst with watercolour splashes on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A stylised orange sun or flower with long black linework tendrils sits at the centre of the design. Soft blue, green and purple washes spread outward and drip downwards, giving a painted watercolour effect. The tattoo is shown on the upper back near the nape of the neck, with the skin looking shiny and slightly wet.

Back Sun Flower Splash Drip Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paraffin stove has gone out again, so you crack the galley hatch and let the grey light in. The sea comes with it, a fine salt drizzle that beads on the rail and runs down the steel in thin tracks. Skipper Haddow wants porridge before the nets go over, and you have one pan, half a bag of oats and a tin of syrup gone hard as toffee. You chip at it with a butter knife while the kettle ticks towards a boil.

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Through the porthole the cloud tears open over the wheelhouse and a hard orange sun hauls itself up out of the swell. It throws its rays across the water in spiky, black-edged shadows, the way your mother drew them in the margins of the ration book before she gave up on colour altogether. You still have her paint box, two cakes of blue worn almost to nothing, wedged behind the spice rack where the damp can't reach them.

The kettle screams. You pour, and the syrup loosens into a gold thread that spreads across the oats. The boat lurches on a wave, the pan skids, and a slop of porridge flies up the bulkhead, hangs there a moment, then slides down in long streaks. The blue from the tea towel you grabbed to steady it catches the light, the green from a jar of pickled onions that has leaked in the locker bleeds into it, and a purple smear from a jam jar nobody has washed since August joins them. The wall looks like a painting someone abandoned halfway.

Haddow ducks in, dripping, and stops. He stares at the splash, then at the sun through the glass, and grunts. He takes his bowl without a word about the wall, and you leave the streaks where they are, because the sun is up now and somebody ought to look at it.