Black continuous-line cloud with green, red, orange and blue rainbow drips running down the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scribbled cloud with rainbow drips on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A looping black outline of a cloud sits at the top of the design, with the line drawn in a loose, scribbled style. Below it, four vertical bands of green, red, orange and blue run down and fade into soft drips, giving a painted, watercolour-like finish. The design is centred on a smooth area of upper arm against a plain black background.

Fine line Upper arm Cloud Rainbow Rain Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drought had lasted nine weeks when Mr Pruett sent you up the ladder with a tin of cloud-grey and a clean brush, and told you to paint the sky over the Corn Exchange as if you meant it. Tallow Bridge had stopped looking up. Dust lay on the bunting left over from the Coronation, and the gasworks chimney had gone quiet on the hour out of sheer habit.

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You started with the cloud, because the cloud was easy. You looped the line loosely across the brick, letting the brush wander the way your gran's pencil wandered when she was thinking about something else, so the outline came out soft and scribbled, like a cloud drawn by someone who wasn't sure they were allowed. Mrs Ashdown from the chemist's stopped on the pavement below and asked what on earth it was for. Rain, you said. She laughed, and then she didn't.

Below the cloud you laid down the bands: green for the hedgerows gone brown, red for the single bus that ran on Tuesdays, orange for the sunsets nobody had seen through the haze, blue for the reservoir that was down to its stones. You thinned the paint with bucket water until it ran pale at the edges, and let each stripe drip where it wanted to, past the sill and the drainpipe, toward the cobbles.

On the third afternoon the wind swung round to the west. You were still on the ladder with the last blue drip wet on the brick when a fat spot hit the back of your hand, then another, and the street filled with the smell of hot stone giving way. Mrs Ashdown came out with her umbrella furled and stood beneath your painted colours, looking up with her mouth open, while the real rain fell in those four bands and ran them down into the gutters of Tallow Bridge all the way to the river.