Black swirl-outlined heart tattoo with pink, purple, yellow and turquoise watercolour splashes on a forearm.

Swirled heart with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A heart outline drawn in black linework with curled scrolls at the top and the point, set over loose splashes of pink, purple, yellow and turquoise. The black lines are bold and sit over a soft, blurred colour wash that fades out toward the edges. The tattoo is shown close up on a forearm against a plain wall.

Forearm Heart Swirl Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain on Tessary came in four colours that year, eleven hundred years after the last ship landed, and the eel-wives said the sky had been asked for water too often and had started to bleed. Nobody believed them, but nobody stood under the gutters either.

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Pell, who was nine and had no business on the high ridge, climbed the curled ferns past the last drying racks with a clay pot under his coat. His grandmother had told him the old dye-keeper lived where the ferns coiled tightest, in a hut shaped like a shell, and that she would trade colour for anything true. He had one true thing: he had broken his mother's blue bowl and blamed the goats.

The dye-keeper was taller than her door. She took the pot, sniffed it, and set it on a flat stone. "Lies make grey," she said. "Yours is only sorry, so it will come out pink." She drew a heart on the stone with a black stick, then curled a scroll at its top and another at its point, so the lines would hold whatever was poured inside. Then she told him to walk to the edge of the ridge and tip the pot into the rain.

He did. The colours ran out past the heart's edges and blurred down the slope like spilled sugar, pink first, then violet, then a thin turquoise that smelled of the sea. When he looked back, the black lines stood firm while the colour spread and faded at the margins, reaching for every roof in the valley.

That night the rain fell in four colours again. Pell's mother put the broken bowl back on the shelf, and the eel-wives said nothing at all.