Watercolour-style tattoo on a forearm combining a black outlined triangle with a multicoloured brushstroke arc in blue, green, red and orange.

Watercolour brushstroke and triangle on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black outlined triangle sits on the forearm with a loose grey wash and a small red dot below it, plus a thin black circle at its lower left. Above and to the right, a sweeping brushstroke arc fades from green and blue through purple into red and orange, with splatter dots at its edges. The soft, painterly shading and open composition give a watercolour look, with the colour dominating the upper design.

Forearm Triangle Brushstroke Arc Circle Splatter Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush had dried stiff in its jar, so Nell worked the bristles against her palm until they softened, then carried the paint out to the stern of the Marigold. Her father was at the tiller, shouting at a heron that refused to shift off the lock gate. Below them the canal ran flat and brown toward Seddon Lock, and a skin of oil lay on the surface, catching every colour the sky had forgotten to keep.

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She had been told to paint the cabin roof, the way her grandmother had, with the old red and green lettering. But the roof was already done and the water was not. She dipped, swept a long curve out over the cut, then another inside it, watching the blue bleed into violet and the violet into the rust of the old wall along the towpath. A black triangle she drew with a rule, because her father liked straight lines on boats. It sat on the bow like a sail that had nowhere to catch wind.

Her father came along the gunwale wiping his hands and looked at the arc for a long time. 'That's not a boat,' he said. 'It's a wave going the wrong way.' She told him it was the weather turning, and he laughed, because it had rained for three weeks and nobody on the cut had seen the sun since Easter. He took the rag from his pocket, dabbed a grey wash beneath the triangle, then pressed a red dot beside it with his thumb, like a buoy marking where the bottom was soft.

They moved off at four. Behind them the paint was still wet on the water, the arc unravelling slowly in the wake, and the red dot drifted toward the lock until a keeper's boy fished it out with a pole and held it up to the light, puzzled, as if someone had lost a small sun.