Collage of four colourful watercolour-style tattoos on arms: an anchor with rope, a deer, a skull and an outlined lily, with the lily and anchor on forearms and the skull on the upper arm.

Watercolour anchor, deer, skull and lily

Forearm · Colour · Photo

This collage shows four tattoos on skin. An outlined anchor wrapped in rope and a deer's head in profile sit on forearms, while a grey shaded skull is on the upper arm and an outlined lily is on a forearm or wrist. Each design has loose coloured wash and splash effects in pink, blue, purple and green behind or around the linework, which is black or dark grey.

Forearm Upper arm Anchor Rope Deer Galaxy Skull Lily Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint came off the Mary Ellen in a tin with no lid, the morning after she broke on the Cragg. My father dried the pigments on the kitchen windowsill because nothing else on Skerrow would hold colour through a winter. Blue from the ship's signal lamps, rose from the cook's tinned beetroot, a green that smelled of kelp and never quite washed out of the cloth. I was nine, and I thought it was a kind of magic.

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The anchor stayed on the shingle where the crew had dragged it, the rope still knotted round the shank. Nobody would move it. Mam said a thing that had held a boat should be allowed to rest where it lay. So every Sunday I went down with my paper and painted it, wet washes running into the sky until the rust looked like weather and the rope looked like it might still pull.

In October a hind came swimming across the Sound, which no deer had ever done. She climbed out with her ears streaming and something glittering along her flank, as though someone had spilled a night sky over her and let it dry. The old men crossed themselves at the harbour wall. I only wanted her eye. She held still long enough for me to get it, dark and patient, then walked up into the heather and the purple ran off my brush before I could finish her legs.

When the lilies came up that spring along the graveyard wall, I drew them in black ink, the hard line Dad taught me, the kind you cannot unmake. Then I let the colour spill past the edges. Pink, blue, a little green from the old tin. The skull I painted on the back of the chapel door was the last thing I did before the ferry came for good, and I still think it grins at the paint like it knows exactly where the lines were never meant to hold.