Close-up of a geometric tattoo of three outlined diamonds with red and black ink splashes running down from them, on the calf of a leg.

Three diamonds with red and black splashes on a leg

Geometric · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Three outlined diamonds are arranged in a diagonal cluster on the skin. The diamonds have soft, blended red shading inside their black outlines, and black and dark red ink bleeds downwards from them in loose, splattered streaks. The image is a close, straight-on photo against a tiled floor, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Geometric Calf Diamond Splash Ink splatter Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint tin split at the second lock, and by the time Ruth Okonedo had jammed the lid back on, the black had already run down the cabin side in long, uneven tongues. She swore at it under her breath, the way her father used to, then sat down on the front step with a rag and watched the canal ripple past the hull.

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The three diamonds on the doors had been there since 1974, when her father had painted them freehand with a brush he never cleaned. Two of them were flaking now, and the red had sunk into the grain of the wood like tea into a cloth. She mixed oxblood with a drop of lamp black on the lid of a jam jar and dabbed at the blistered edge of the top diamond. The lock keeper's boy leaned on his gate and asked why she was bothering, if it was all going to peel anyway.

She didn't answer him. She was thinking about the summer her father had lost the boat in a flood on the Avon and had come back up the towpath with mud to his knees, laughing, because the diamonds had survived the water when the rest of the paint had not. He had told her a good mark should look like it had been through something. She had thought he was talking about boats.

When the boy wandered off, she dipped the brush again and let the next splash fall where it wanted. The drips ran down past the waterline and the river took them, the way it took everything, and by evening the three diamonds looked exactly as they had the day he finished them.