Two traditional style colour tattoos on the forearms, an umbrella with teal raindrops on the left and an anatomical heart with a yellow flower on the right, each with curved lettering.

Umbrella and anatomical heart on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two matching tattoos sit side by side on the forearms. The left shows a striped umbrella in grey, red and yellow with teal raindrops falling beneath it, and the right shows a red anatomical heart with grey vessels, green leaves and a yellow flower. Both have bold black outlines and solid fills, with black text following a curve around each design.

Traditional Forearm Umbrella Raindrop Heart Anatomical heart Flower Leaves Vein Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove and hold your tea in both hands, because I'm not telling this twice. Your great-uncle Len never once carried a brolly on the boat. Not at Reading, not at Devizes, not in all the years we went up and down the Kennet with coal. He'd stand on the back deck with his nose lifted like a dog at a gate and say, 'Rain by four, Peg.' And it would be. Ten past four, every time, and the sheets soaked before he'd got them off the line.

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So for his sixtieth I bought him an umbrella from the market at Newbury, black with red and yellow stripes round the canopy, because he'd laughed at me for years about carrying one. He opened it on the towpath and looked at it the way you'd look at a cat that had come in wearing your hat. 'What's that for?' he said. 'For the day you're wrong,' I said. He never was. He'd still put it up over the tiller, and the rain would drum on those stripes while he grinned like a boy.

The winter his chest went, he couldn't climb to the back deck any more, so I stood there for him. I read the sky the way he'd taught me, and all I could smell was diesel and wet willow. I went below and told him so. He caught my wrist and said, 'You're the smell before rain, Peg. You always were. You just never trusted your own nose.' Then he asked for the brolly, and I opened it over the bed so he could hear it drumming on the stripes.

It rained that night, the first real rain in a month. I sat in the cabin with the umbrella open beside me, dripping onto the boards, and I didn't mind the mess. He used to say I was the blood in his veins. That night I felt it all the way to my fingertips, and I listened to every drop.