Colourful watercolour-style flower tattoo with black linework and splatter running up the forearm.

Watercolour flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two large open flowers with pink and yellow petals sit on a tall black stem that climbs the forearm, with a small bud at the base. The petals are outlined in black linework and filled with soft blue, green, yellow and pink washes, with fine black splatter spread around the design. Colour ink dominates the composition against plain pale skin and a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the lilies came up through the cinder of the old siding at Hallam Road the week after the big top went down for the last time, which I suppose is the sort of thing you would make a poem of and I can only make a mess of. Mr Varley has sold the elephant to a dealer in Hull and the strongman has taken a job pulling pints in Scarborough, so it is only me, the wagon, and the paints.

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I have been painting them every morning before the rain comes in off the moor. The stalks are tall and black because that is the only ink I had left that did not run, and the petals I wash in whatever the children have left in their box of colours, pink first, then a gold that goes orange where it pools, then a green stain at the throat where the blue bled in from the sky. Splashes from the brush go everywhere. Varley says a painting with no splashes is a painting that has been told what to do.

Last Thursday a boy from the signal box came down with his dinner tin and asked if the flowers were for sale. I said they were not, but I would trade him a drawing for a cup of tea. He sat on the buffer and watched me work for an hour, and when I finished he pointed at the bud at the bottom, the one I had let droop, and said that was the bit he liked best, because it was still deciding.

I have decided to stay until the lilies go over. After that I will take the wagon south. You will laugh, but I think I might be learning to be still.

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