Close-up of a small heart tattoo on a chest with a thin black sketchy outline and a rainbow watercolour fill, with red-nailed hands resting either side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow watercolour heart on the chest

Fine line · Chest · Colour · Photo

A small heart outline is drawn in loose, thin black linework that sketches past its edges at the top and right. The interior is filled with soft watercolour-style bands of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple that fade into the skin. The heart sits centrally on the chest, framed by two hands with red nails at the top and right of the frame.

Fine line Chest Heart Rainbow Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had been painting the same sign for three days because the paint kept refusing to dry in the sea air. It hung over the chandler's door on Church Street, a heart she had been asked to paint for the wedding of the chandler's daughter, Margaret Oddie, who wanted the couple's initials tucked inside. Dilys had sketched it in pencil, then in black ink, and the ink had wandered as it always did when she was tired. The top curve ran past the edge of the board, and the right side looped back on itself like a dog that would not come to heel.

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"Leave it," said Margaret's mother from the step, a cup of tea in each hand. "It looks like it's trying to get out."

Dilys did not answer straight away. She had washed the inside with colour, red at the top where the sun came round the tower, then orange, yellow, green from the bracken on the cliff, blue, and purple at the bottom where the harbour went dark. She had meant to put the initials there in gold leaf, but the colours had bled into one another and made a kind of weather, and she could not find a place in it for letters.

On the morning of the wedding the rain came in off the North Sea before the bells. Dilys stood under the awning with a brush and watched the water pull the purple down into the blue and the red into the orange, until the heart looked less like a sign and more like the sky after a storm. Margaret's husband, Tom, came up the street in a borrowed suit and stopped in front of it. He read it, then read it again, and laughed.

"Where are the names?" he asked.

"Gone into the weather," Dilys said.

He nodded as though that were the answer he had hoped for. When the photographer asked them to stand beneath it, the loose black line ran out over the pavement, and nobody could tell where the heart stopped and the street began.