Fine line tattoo of a Pantone-style colour swatch reading TATTONE 5K1 N on the upper arm, with a grey shirt sleeve over the shoulder.

Pantone-style colour swatch tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small rectangular colour swatch sits on the outer upper arm, outlined in black with a white label area reading TATTONE and 5K1 N, mimicking a Pantone chip. The linework is thin and clean with no shading, and the ink is black on pale skin. The tattoo is framed by a grey shirt sleeve and a blurred background, with the shoulder and arm filling most of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Text Rectangle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, you asked why I never sent you the old swatch book, so here is the reason, and it isn't the one your mother gives. For forty-one years I matched greys for printers in Leeds and Halifax at Calder and Pryce, and the book on my desk held every shade we ever sold, numbered, fanned and cross-referenced. Except one. Harold Quarmby found it in 1974 when a batch of cheap ink came out of the mixer the colour of wet slate, neither warm nor cool, and no customer ever asked for it twice.

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Harold cut a card to size, typed the code on a strip of label tape and slid it into the book between the fives and the sixes, under a heading he wrote as TATTONE, a joke at the expense of a brother-in-law who owed him money. I thought it vulgar. Then in 1982 an apprentice from a Bradford print shop came in holding a carrier bag she'd fished out of a skip, printed in that exact grey, and asked me to name it. I couldn't. I told her we no longer carried it. She said it was the only honest colour she had ever seen, and she was right.

Harold died the winter of 1999 and left me the book with a note that said only: keep the gap open. So I did. When the new manager wanted the stock sheets tidied I told him the number was a typo, and he believed me because I have never once mixed it, not even in the back room with nobody watching. Some Sunday mornings I take the book out and hold the blank card up to the window, and the canal light comes through it grey and patient.

I still carry the shade in my head, which is the trouble. Come up at Easter and I'll show you the gap. Bring a grey jumper, and I'll tell you whether it matches.