Fine line tattoo of a serotonin molecule with purple, blue and pink watercolour splashes on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Serotonin molecule with watercolour splashes

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A thin black line drawing of a serotonin molecule, with the ring structure and labels HO, NH2 and H, sits on pale skin. Soft watercolour splashes in purple, blue, teal and pink fill the rings and spread around the linework. The plain patterned background and even lighting keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Molecule Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell found the drawing pinned inside the lid of the dye cupboard: a hexagon with a crooked arm reaching off one corner, and the letters HO and NH2 squeezed in beside the joins. Mr Tarrant had inked it in iron-gall, then dabbed it with whatever colours were left on his palette that week, so the rings looked faintly bruised, as if the paper had been out in the rain.

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"What is it?" she asked, one hand still wet from the madder bath. He didn't look up from the scales. "A thing the body makes so it doesn't feel too much at once," he said. "Or so the gentlemen in London believe. I think it only keeps the good days from being wasted." It was not a man who said much before the noon whistle, so she took the answer and went back to her vats.

The Thursday order was for forty bolts of teal for the Halifax hosiers, and by three o'clock her sleeves were blue to the elbow. She reached for the wrong jar, a sour-smelling pink that had been sitting since spring, and a single drop went off the rim of the pan and landed squarely on the pinned sheet. The ink ran in a slow halo, violet bleeding into teal, and the crooked arm of the molecule dissolved into a little cloud.

She waited for the shouting. Instead Mr Tarrant came over, lifted the sheet by its corner, and held it to the window for a long moment. Then he took a fresh page from the drawer, drew the same hexagon in clean black, and pinned it beside the stained one without a word.