Colour tattoo of a black silhouetted figure in a top hat, set against green and purple splashes, on the forearm.

Top hat silhouette with paint splashes

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a figure in a top hat, shown mid-pose with one arm raised, fills the centre of the arm. Clean outlines and flat black fill are used, with a few fine dots and a thin sketchy line around the figure. Green and lilac splashes surround the figure, and a red and orange flower sits at the lower edge of the frame.

Forearm Silhouette Top hat Figure Splatter Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Aldous Quill had painted backdrops at the Grand Pavilion for twenty-two winters, and he had learned that a silhouette was mostly a matter of leaving things out. Tonight the stage manager wanted a gentleman in a top hat dancing against a painted moon, and the moon had arrived from Margate in the wrong tins. Lilac and lime, when the order had said silver and ochre. Quill stood on the rostrum with a size-twelve brush in his teeth and cursed the merchant in three languages, two of which he had learned from sailors.

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The black was the only tin he trusted. He mixed it thick, the way his father had taught him on the harbour wall, and began with the hat because hats were honest things: brim first, crown second, a little tilt where the crown met the air. One arm rose above the head as though it had just caught a falling coin. Behind him the young lighting boy knocked a bucket of lilac wash off the trestle, and it went across the lower sky in a spray. Quill swore, then stopped swearing and watched it.

"Leave it," said Mrs Dorrit from the wings, who had sewn every costume in the place since before the war. "The lad's got nothing on that stage but a bit of shadow, and now there's weather behind him." So Quill left it. He flicked a few fine dots with the tip of the brush where the splashes ran into the black, then drew a thin, ragged line round the figure, quick as chalk.

On the night the curtain rose on a hushed house and the lamps dimmed to blue. The dancer stepped into the light, his shadow thrown huge across the painted moon, and the green and violet splashes caught the footlights like fireflies. Somebody in the stalls gasped. Quill, at the back with his hands in his pockets, decided he would tell the merchant nothing at all.