Close-up of a realistic colour wheel tattoo on a forearm, showing rainbow paint dabs with brush marks and soft shading, in a realism style.

Paint dab colour wheel on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a ring of eleven paint dabs arranged like a colour wheel, each with a glossy highlight and a soft drop shadow so they appear raised from the skin. The dabs move through purple, maroon, red, orange, yellow, lime, green, teal and blue, with visible brush streaks in several of them. The colours are bright and saturated against the pale skin, and the ring is centred on the forearm.

Realism Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had the lid off the lead white before the boat stopped rocking, and she was already annoyed with herself for letting Dennis talk her into the Thursday run. The Sally Ann lay against the lock gate at Hatton with her roses half-finished on the cabin side, and the light was going the colour of weak tea.

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She laid out the palette on the back of an old bread tray, the way her mother had taught her in a shed in Stourport: the cool colours on the left, the warm on the right, and each dab placed around the rim so she could see the whole wheel at once. Purple first, then maroon, red, orange. She dragged the flat brush through the yellow until it made a streak like a comet's tail, and she thought about how nobody bought a narrowboat for the paint on it. They bought it for the feeling of having something pretty to come home to.

Dennis came up the towpath with two mugs and a cigarette he was pretending not to have. He looked at the tray and laughed. "You're not doing the cabin in that, are you? It looks like a bruise that's been to a party."

"It's for the coal box lid," she said. "Lime, green, teal, blue. Then I close the circle."

He sat on the gunwale and watched her lay down the last dab, a shadow under it so it sat proud of the wood, glossy as if still wet. When she stepped back the wheel looked like it could be lifted off and rolled down the cut. Dennis said nothing for a while, then tapped his mug against her knee. "Right. Now you can tell me why you're still here."