Watercolour style tattoo of a woman's face with pink, purple and blue washes on the inner forearm, with a red sleeve at the edge of the frame.

Watercolour face tattoo on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman's face in profile is painted in loose watercolour washes across the forearm, with the eyes and lips picked out in soft pink and purple. Blue and red petal-like splashes drift around the head and fade out at the edges, with faint grey linework suggesting the hair and outline. The soft, bleeding colour is set against plain skin and a bright red sleeve, with a blurred grey background.

Forearm Face Woman Flower Petal Watercolour Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the pair of you, and don't mind the wet. The mist comes up off the Col of Ardra every evening when the light goes thin, and it carries voices with it. That is how Marta heard her sister calling from the far side of the pass, though the road was empty and Ilse had been gone since midsummer.

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Ilse had gone up for poppies and gentians for the old woman in the valley who made fever tinctures. Red and blue, she said, the colours that never hold still. Marta waited three days, then took a lantern and the tin of paints her father used for lettering the cart boards, because she could not think what else to carry for a sister lost in cloud.

The higher she climbed, the more the mist wanted colour. Every flower she brushed left a stain on her fingers, pink where she touched the poppies, violet where she touched the gentian bells. Petals rose and fell in the wind without ever landing. In a hollow below the summit she found a face pressed into the cloud, her sister's face in profile, lips the colour of crushed fruit, eyes wet with blue, hair trailing off into flowers that dissolved as they drifted away.

Marta did not sing or pray. She painted the face back onto the rock of the hollow, one wash at a time, and every stroke drew a little of the mist down into the stone until the pass was clear and the sky was the bare grey of morning. The paint dried soft, the edges bleeding as though it had never quite agreed to stop.

Ilse came down the valley road that afternoon with an empty basket, saying she had only been sleeping. Nobody believes the story, but the mist still rises at dusk, and if you look at the rock below the Col you will see a face washed out at the edges, still trying to say a name.