Forearm tattoo of a black smiley face with X eyes inside a ring, with black spikes and splatter dots, over a pink and teal watercolour wash.

Smiley face with X eyes on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black ring encloses a smiley face with X-shaped eyes and a curved mouth, with small red splatter dots across the face. Black triangular spikes trail along the upper left edge of the ring, with loose black splatter dots below, and the linework is bold and solid. Behind the design, pink and teal watercolour-style bands wrap around the forearm, making the image mixed in colour; the photo is taken straight on under indoor light.

Forearm Smiley face Ring Splatter Spike Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been lying under the stern of the narrowboat Patience since six, scraping at the old roundel with a putty knife, when the lock gates at Hatch Bridge groaned open and somebody on the towpath shouted that the water was coming through. She wriggled out with rust in her hair. The smiley had been painted by her grandfather in 1971 to annoy the council: two X's for eyes, a black ring drawn so fast the gloss ran in drips, and a spray of splatter that he swore was the canal's own sort of joke. Nobody had asked her to keep it. Nobody had asked her to take it off either.

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Her cousin Lou came along the path with two mugs of tea and a face like she'd already heard the answer. "You're not really taking that off," she said. "It's the only thing on this boat anybody recognises." Nell pointed at the pink and teal bands she had blended the week before, wet on wet, because the cut at dusk looked exactly like that and Grandad always said paint should copy weather. The spikes trailing the top of the ring were his joke too: arrows that never quite caught up with the thing they were chasing.

By the time the boat had dropped and the gates swung shut behind them, Nell had stopped scraping. She dipped a fine brush in the red tin she kept for ladybirds and dabbed two more specks onto the smiley's cheek, where the rust had bled through like a bad night. Lou laughed and asked what they were for. Nell shrugged. The water below the lock held the whole circle upside down, X's and all, and for a second it looked less like a warning than a welcome.