Colourful tattoo of a serotonin molecule diagram in thin black line, surrounded by blue, green, pink and yellow splashes, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Serotonin molecule with watercolour splashes on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A black line diagram of a serotonin molecule, with its ring structure and labelled HO, NH and NH2 groups, sits at the centre of the design. Fine black linework forms the molecule, while soft, blended washes of blue, green, yellow, pink, purple and red spread across the skin around it in splashes and streaks. The colour is concentrated around the molecule and fades toward the edges of the forearm, leaving the chemical structure as the clear focal point.

Forearm Molecule Chemical structure Splashes Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are halfway across the floor of the Ellery Palais when the mirror ball stutters and the coloured gels Mr Hobday has taped to the lamps turn the whole hall the colour of boiled sweets. Blue slides over the bandstand, then green, then a dirty pink that makes the girls by the urn look hastily painted. Pinned beside the cloakroom hatch is the poster Dr Pryce from the grammar school left behind after his Christmas lecture: a hexagon with a ring, two little arms, and letters that look like HO and NH2 scratched in biro.

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He finds you at the hatch, collar up, smelling of Woodbines and chalk. "That's the one that carries the feeling," he says, tapping the ring. "A message goes from one nerve to the next, and this little fellow tells the second nerve to keep going, or to stop." You ask whether it is happiness. He laughs and says happiness is a crowd of molecules and a bad night's sleep, and nobody has the whole recipe. You ask him to show you where the message crosses the gap, and he draws it on the back of a bus ticket: a dotted line, a small brave arrow.

The band starts up a waltz nobody is dancing to, so you do, badly, with the cloakroom man's son, while the colours slide across everyone's faces in streaks. When the lights come up at half eleven, the pink has gone to ash on the walls, and the poster has come unpinned, curled at one corner as if it wants to leave.

You fold it into your coat and keep it. Years later, when the Palais is a bingo house and the gels have long been thrown out, you still find the ring pressed between the pages of your hymn book, the blue wash faded to a ghost, the arrow still pointing at the next gap.