Black and grey realism tattoo of several paintbrushes standing in a pot on the forearm, set against a soft smoky background.

Paintbrushes in a pot on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of paintbrushes of varying sizes standing upright in a cylindrical pot. The brushes and pot are rendered with smooth shading, fine highlights and soft, blurred grey tones behind them. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the composition is centred with the pot at the base of the design.

Realism Forearm Pot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the pot on the windowsill of bay four at ten past three, when the monitors have settled into their slow green chatter and the corridor lights have dropped to the amber they keep for nights. Five brushes stand in a tin that once held cocoa, their bristles splayed like feathers on a bird that has given up on flying. The bed beside it belongs to Stanley Mabry, who is in theatre until six with a repaired hip, and who has spent a fortnight painting the car park from his pillows on the backs of takeaway menus.

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You are supposed to bag his belongings for the morning. Instead you carry the tin to the sluice and run the tap until the water is warm, and you work the largest brush gently between your finger and thumb, watching the grey paint lift from the ferrule. The sluice smells of bleach and wet cardboard. Through the high window a bus goes past, its lit windows sliding over the tiles like a film on a loop.

When Stanley is wheeled back at half five he is pale and cross and asks for his tin before he asks for water. You hand it over with the brushes dry and upright. He tips them, counts them, and frowns at the smallest one. "Shadows," he says, as if you should have known. "I only ever use grey. Colour is for people with somewhere to be in the morning."

He holds out a menu and a biro, and you draw the outline of a pot on the back of it, badly, while he corrects you from the bed. When the first light reaches the window he takes the largest brush, wets it on his tongue the way nobody should, and paints a thin dark line across the glass where the car park lamp is fading.