Colour tattoo of a paintbrush and autumn leaves above a script quote reading paint with all the colors of the wind, on a person's ribs, in a neo-traditional style.

Paintbrush, autumn leaves and script on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A curved paintbrush with a red-banded handle sweeps down over a cluster of colourful oak leaves with a blue wash beneath them. Beneath the design, black cursive script reads paint with all the colors of the wind. The outlines are bold and the leaves and brush are shaded in red, orange, green and brown, with a clean, centred composition on the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Ribs Paintbrush Leaves Script Quote Wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The brush you asked about is the long-handled one with the red bands, the one Mr Tiller left in the drawer of the boathouse when he went up to Scarborough and never came back for. I have been using it for the lettering on the Mary Ellen's transom, and it still holds a point like a pen. Your grandfather swore by it. He used to say a good sign brush should curve like a heron's neck, so the paint goes where you send it and not where it pleases.

Mostly I am writing about the autumn leaves. The oaks along the quay turned all at once this week, copper and rust and a green that hasn't given up yet, and the wind off the estuary keeps lifting them out over the water in long swirls. I stood on the slipway on Tuesday with a pot of ochre and a pot of cobalt and tried to get the look of it down on an old hatch cover, and it would not sit still. Every stroke I laid was already somewhere else by the time I lifted the brush.

So I gave up on the hatch cover and simply watched. Then I understood what the old fellow meant when he painted that line on the wall of the chandlery, the one people stop to read on their way to the ferry. Paint with all the colours of the wind. I always thought it was a bit of a boast. Now I think it is an instruction, and a hard one.

Come down at half term. Bring the good tins. We will do the transom together, and you can show me how you hold the brush, because I have been doing it wrong for forty years.

Love, Gran