Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a treble clef surrounded by rainbow splashes on the upper arm.

Rainbow watercolour treble clef on arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A treble clef sits at the centre of a loose splash of watercolour-style colour, with red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple paint trails rising and spreading around it. The clef is outlined in pale, slightly translucent linework, and the colour is soft and blended rather than solid. The tattoo is framed by bare skin on a close, straight-on crop of the arm.

Upper arm Treble clef Music Watercolour splash Rainbow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad never let anyone touch the lid of the upright in the front room of the Gull Street boarding house, so when the paint pots came down from the chandler's loft that August, it was me who had to lift it. Mrs Pellow had ordered a sign for the harbour choir, and the signwriter, a quiet man called Tobias Rhee who smelled of linseed, had squeezed every colour he owned onto a single saucer.

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He wanted the clef in the middle of it all, drawn in pencil first and then left bare. 'Colour wants a line to hold it,' he said, and dragged the graphite round the curl of the clef as though he were tuning a string. The red ran up from the bottom of the board like the splash off a dropped bucket, purple crept in from the left where the fog had been, and the blues pooled where the boats came in on the evening tide.

The choir met in the back room of the Ship on Thursdays. They practised an old Cornish hymn until the windows steamed, and by the third week the sign was dry enough to hang above the door. Dad climbed the ladder to check it was level and said nothing, which from him was praise. The pencil lines were already faint under the varnish, pale as chalk marks on a slate.

On the first night the sign went up, the singers opened the door and the sound rolled down the quay to the water. I stood by the bollards with the tuning fork in my pocket and heard the whole harbour go quiet to listen. Tobias was right. The colour had been held all along, and the line was the part that let the rest go out over the water.