Watercolour-style tattoo of a ringed circle above a cross-shaped line on a forearm, with pink, green, blue and yellow washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour circle and cross on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm bears a tattoo of a ringed circle with a vertical line and cross-bar beneath it, resembling a key or the female symbol. The linework is soft and blurred, with shaded washes of pink, green, blue and yellow spreading around the motif. The background is a dark sleeve and a paint-splattered surface in pale tones, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Forearm Circle Cross Key Watercolour splash Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor had seen Mrs Okafor's key since the council sent men to paint the stairwells a pale yellow, which is how I came to be holding it. It had slipped through the grate of the bin chute, a brass ring with a stem and a notched cross-bar, and I knew straight away it was the roof hatch key, because my father kept one just like it on a nail beside the meter.

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I should have handed it to the caretaker. Instead I put it in my overall pocket with the tin of pink I'd mixed for the landings, because the paint was skinning over in the cans and the light up there at six goes the colour of weak tea. The hatch stuck. I put my shoulder to it, and when it gave, the wind came in smelling of diesel, wet pigeons and something sweet from the bakery on Coronation Road.

Mrs Okafor was already up there, perched on an upturned crate with a sketchbook on her knee. She didn't look surprised. She said her husband had cut that key himself in 1979 so nobody could lock her out, and she'd used it for forty years to watch the boats go up the river, though there hadn't been a boat on that stretch since before my time. She took it from me, turned it once in the air, and laughed at the dent I'd put in the stem.

Below us the whole estate was going pink, then green, then a bruised blue at the edges, as if someone had dropped a wet brush on the city. She handed me her pencil and told me to finish the circle, since my hand was steadier than hers. I did. The lines were fine, but the colour bled wherever I breathed on the page.