Two watercolour-style rainbow heart tattoos on the inner forearms, one a filled heart with droplets and the other an unfilled heart with rainbow splashes.

Rainbow hearts on two forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a heart tattoo in rainbow colours. The left heart is filled with blue, green and red shading and surrounded by small coloured droplets, while the right heart is left as bare skin inside a splash of rainbow colour. The soft, blended edges and bright palette give both pieces a loose watercolour look against a black and white tiled floor.

Forearm Heart Rainbow Droplet Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide was still making when Nell pushed a tin of cobalt across the upturned crate and told me the hull had to be ready by Saturday, drizzle or no drizzle. We had the Dorothy Ann on the hard at Porthkerris, her bottom scraped down to grey wood, and Nell had a notion about hearts. Her father painted a heart on every boat he owned, always filled in, always a little crooked. She wanted one filled and one left bare, so the name could go in later.

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"Why leave one empty?" I asked. She dipped a sable into the red and let a bead of it fall onto the newspaper. "Because he never finished anything he started. I'd like to leave room for him to come back and do it himself."

We worked the rainbow wet on wet, letting each colour bleed into the next so the bands softened at the edges. Nell flicked spatter from an old toothbrush over the blue until it looked like sea spray caught in a wind. The filled heart came out lopsided, red at the bottom, green creeping up one side, a scatter of droplets I thought too cheerful for a fishing boat. Nell said that was the point.

When the paint dried, the bare heart sat in the middle of its splash like a window with nothing behind it yet. On Saturday the Dorothy Ann went down the slip with both hearts facing the quay. Nell stood on the wall with her hands in her pockets, and when a gull landed on the bare heart she laughed and said it was the first name anyone had suggested for it.