Two matching cartoon tattoos on a pair of forearms, each showing a character in a grey cloud-shaped frame with a blue outline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two cartoon characters on matching forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are pressed together, each carrying half of a cartoon scene. The left figure has purple hair with a bow and faces right, while the right figure has orange hair, a pink top and teal trousers and faces left, with a small red heart between them. The cartoon linework is bold and outlined, with flat colour and soft grey shading inside pale blue, cloud-like frames.

Forearm Cartoon character Couple Heart Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cloud borders were Dilys Penhallow's idea, painted on the cel room windowsill with a sponge and a jar of cold tea, because the studio had run out of sky. Fenn, the orange-haired lad, had been drawn to lift his chin at the ceiling. Marisa, purple bow and all, had been drawn to look straight at him. The director called it a continuity error. Dilys called it the only honest frame in the reel.

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The two figures were never meant to share a wall. Pinned to separate boards, they spent eleven weeks of overnight shoots facing a gap of cardboard, Fenn's freckled chin lifted, Marisa's bow tilted, each waiting for a line of dialogue that never came. Dilys kept the cels in a biscuit tin under the stairs. Some nights the tin rattled when the trains went through the tunnel beneath Harrow Lane, and she swore the paper figures leant a little closer each time.

When the studio closed in the spring, the boards went out in a van with the rest of the stock. Dilys took the two cels home and pressed them together edge to edge so the frames met, the grey clouds blurring into one sky. She painted a small red heart in the seam with the last of the vermilion. It came out crooked, because the brush was nearly dry and her hand was not steady.

Nobody bought the film. Years later a man in a print shop on Jubilee Street asked her why the pair looked so pleased with each other, and she told him the ink had all come from one jar on purpose. He laughed and asked for a proof. She did not explain that she had simply stopped trying to keep them apart.