Black brushstroke line with crescent shapes and a pink and blue watercolour wash on a woman's upper back, running down from the neck.

Watercolour brushstroke line on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A vertical black brushstroke line runs down the centre of the upper back, with two crescent and circular shapes sketched across it near the top. Soft pink, violet and pale blue watercolour washes bleed around the lower half of the line, and the black ink has fine splatter marks. The subject is shown from behind against a painted abstract backdrop, with the tattoo placed centrally between the shoulder blades.

Back Crescent Circle Brushstroke Line Watercolour Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Hollins Road reunion remembered that Mr Okonedo kept a single brush in a jam jar of cloudy water and would not let us rinse it between colours. I brought it up with Bev Tolley over warm white wine in the sports hall, and she laughed as if she had been waiting for someone to mention it.

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"He said the line was the only honest thing you could put on paper," she said. "One stroke, no going back." She had kept her sixth form sketchbook, the pages gone soft as cloth, and she turned them slowly. There was a long black stroke running off the bottom of the page, two crescents above it like a pair of new moons dropped onto a river, and the colour bled out from the stroke as though the water had got into the paper before the ink dried.

"Which one's yours?" I asked. She tapped the lowest crescent. "I never finished it. He said you could leave a painting before the paint was dry, but you had to decide which way the water would run." We sat with that while the hall noise went on around us, a man by the urn telling a long story about a minibus.

On the way out I found Mr Okonedo's name still on the old board in the corridor, faded under the strip lights. Someone had written beside it in pencil, small enough that I had to stoop: "Brush rinsed. Line held." I photographed it on my phone and walked home the long way, past the canal, watching the lamps lay their light flat across the water.