Fine line black paintbrush tattoo running down the inner forearm of a person wearing dark jeans and a mustard top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paintbrush tattoo on an inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A slim black paintbrush is tattooed vertically along the inner forearm, with the bristle tip pointing towards the wrist. The linework is thin and the shading is solid black with light grey detail on the handle. The photograph is shot against a plain white background, with the lower body and hand visible and the face cropped out.

Fine line Forearm Paintbrush

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Marrin the signwriter died in the wet week of March, and his brushes went to the girl who had swept his floor for six years. There were eleven of them, laid in a tin on the workbench in the back room above the chandler's on Lantern Row. Only one was worn to a fine point, and she kept it apart from the rest, because it was the one he had never let her touch.

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That night the lamps along the canal went out one by one, as they did at the second bell, and she sat up with the tin and a jar of lamp black. She dipped the brush and drew a line down the inside of her own forearm, from the crook to the wrist, the way Marrin used to test a stroke on the back of a board before he trusted it to gold leaf. The bristles laid a line as thin as a hair, and where it reached the wrist the ink stayed wet longer than ink should.

She went down to the water with the brush tucked in her sleeve. The canal lay black, and the lamps on the far bank hung in it like coins at the bottom of a well. She lifted the brush and painted the reflection of the footbridge, stroke by stroke, until the bridge stood up out of the water a second time, whole and dry. Behind her a shutter banged. When she turned, the chandler's sign above the door had been repainted in the dark. Marrin's name was gone, and in its place, in his old gold, stood hers.

She did not know who had done it. The brush lay quiet along her wrist, its tip pointing down towards the water, and she understood that the work had come to her with its own steady hand, and that she would not need to find it.