Black script reading 'I solemnly swear that I am up to no good' over pink, purple and blue watercolour splashes on a forearm tattoo.

Script quote over watercolour splashes on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A black cursive script quote runs across the middle of the forearm, reading 'I solemnly swear that I am up to no good'. Behind the lettering, soft pink, purple and blue watercolour washes bleed outward with splatter marks at the edges. The lettering is crisp and dark against the translucent colour, and the design is framed against a plain black background.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Watercolour splash Cloud Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Wren Lark had been moored below Oxford Lock since Tuesday, and you had been told to keep your head down. Your cousin Pim had painted the cabin roof in a sky nobody could afford to buy, violet bleeding into rose, and he had signed nothing. Every morning the lock-keeper, Mrs Oddie, came down the towpath with her tea in a tin mug and asked what you had been up to. You told her nothing. That was the rule.

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On Thursday the logbook went missing from the wheelhouse. You found it under the bench, its pages swollen from a night of rain, and in the margin someone had written, in a careful looping hand, I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Pim swore it wasn't him. He wrote like a spider with a grievance. You turned the pages and found the lock times for a month, each copied in the same tidy script, and beside them a column of tiny watercolour splashes, as if the rain had been keeping its own accounts.

Mrs Oddie came down at six with the mug. She read the line over your shoulder without asking, then laughed so hard she had to sit on a bollard. "My husband wrote that," she said. "Nineteen sixty-one. He was going to steal the lock gates." She tapped the page with one finger. "He never did. He just wanted me to think he might."

You kept the logbook. By morning the water had dropped and the barge sat lower, and the cabin sky had run in the night, pink pooling into blue. A heron lifted off the reeds, and you wrote beneath the old line, in your own untidy hand: so am I.