Colour tattoo on the ribs of torn lined notebook paper with handwritten script reading I like watching the puddles gather rain, with purple, green, red and orange paint drips.

Torn notebook paper with script and paint drips

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a torn sheet of lined notebook paper with grey shading along its edges, carrying a handwritten script quote. Four paint-like drips in purple, green, red and orange run down from the paper, with softer blue-grey shading around the tears. Colour ink dominates the drips while the paper is rendered mostly in greys, and the design sits centred across the side of the torso.

Lettering Ribs Handwriting Script Quote Rain

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The notebook had lived on the windowsill of the dye house office for three winters, and by March it had no dry pages left. Maud Ackroyd kept it anyway. Vats of madder and indigo stood steaming in the yard below, and when the wind came up off the Calder it carried colour over the sill and dropped it on her ruled lines.

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She wrote in pencil at first, then in ink, the small things the foreman never looked at. Puddles in the cobbles, flat as dinner plates, holding the sky in pieces. A barrow wheel that left a silver moon behind it. Mostly she wrote about rain, because rain in that yard asked nothing of anyone. The longer she sat, the looser her hand became, until the letters ran into one another like chalk left out in the wet.

One Tuesday Gerald Hirst found the book open and read a line aloud in a flat, mocking voice. He stopped halfway through. A drip of green had come down the margin and swallowed the next words, and Maud watched his mouth move over the blot as though he could still make them out. He closed the notebook without a word and set it back on the sill, face down, where the rain could reach it.

The next morning a fresh sheet was pinned to the vat-room door, its edges torn rough by hand. Beneath her line, in a careful clerk's script, someone had added: So do I. Mind the step, it is wet out there.