Watercolour-style tattoo of red and black ink blooms on the side of the ribs, with a teal top visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black watercolour splash on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a cluster of loose, abstract shapes resembling ink blooms or petals, with soft edges and no defined outlines. Red sits in the lower half and black or dark grey in the upper half, with a few small droplets scattered to the right. The subject is set against bare skin on the side of the torso, with a teal garment at the top of the frame.

Ribs Abstract Splatter Bloom Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The madder had gone on too hot, and Marion Tully watched it bloom across the wet wool as though someone had flicked a brush at the bottom of the vat. Her nephew Tom stood at her elbow with the ladle, apologising for the third time that morning. 'Leave it,' she said. 'Wool forgives more than people do.'

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The commission was a christening shawl for the Ackroyd baby, cream merino, ordered in a hurry by a mother who wanted it pale pink and nothing else. Marion had dyed it twice already. On the third go a splash of indigo from the dregs of the old bath had found its way in, and the cloth came up dark along one edge and blushed red below, like a flower held up to a lamp.

Tom wanted to bin it and start again. Marion pegged the shawl on the line in the back yard and let the rain come down on it overnight. By morning the black had softened into grey petals, and a scatter of droplets had run out towards the edge, as if something had been shaken loose from the middle and flown off.

The Ackroyd woman came at ten, lips pressed thin, and held the shawl up to the window. Marion waited for the complaint. Instead the woman touched one of the red blooms with her thumb and said, quite quietly, that her own mother had pinned her hair up with red ribbon just like that. Could it be left as it was? Marion wrapped it in tissue and said yes.