Colour tattoo on a calf of the Vitruvian Man figure in black linework inside a circle, with pink, purple, blue and orange watercolour washes and script lines above and below.

Vitruvian figure with watercolour splashes on a calf

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black linework figure based on Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man sits inside a circle, with arms and legs outstretched, on the back of a lower leg. Above and below the circle are two lines of thin black script that are too small to read clearly. Loose watercolour washes in pink, purple, blue, orange and red spread across the figure and down towards the ankle, giving a mixed colour effect.

Fine line Other Figure Circle Script Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Imelda Forde had been told the drawing was a copy, a nineteenth-century tracing of something older. She laid it on the light table at twenty past six, before the reading room opened, and the radiator ticked as though counting. The circle was perfect. Someone had drawn it with a compass and a steady hand, and the figure sat inside it with its arms flung wide, exactly where the old manuals said a man should sit.

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She had been hired to lift foxing from the margins and nothing else. But the sheet had a hairline crack down its centre, and the glue behind it had gone brittle. When she eased the backing paper away, a bead of water from her cup ran under the edge. The black ink held. The colours did not. Rose and violet and a bruised blue bled up through the paper as though someone had been painting underneath all along, and the two lines of script above and below the circle began to swim.

She sat with her hands in her lap and watched. Outside the high windows the sky moved from ink to slate. A night porter came down the stairs with a trolley and stopped in the doorway. "Don't touch it," she said, though he hadn't moved. He leaned in and frowned. "Is that meant to happen?" "No," she said. "Get the blotter and two teas, and don't breathe on it."

By the time the sun reached the glass the washes had settled like weather. The figure still held its arms out to the circle, but the colour had run down towards the bottom edge in long soft streaks, as if the drawing had decided to walk out of its frame. She photographed it twice and filed the report under damage. In the remarks box she wrote only: proportions unchanged.