Watercolour-style tattoo on a woman's upper back, with an outlined heart, a white crescent moon, red and blue splashes and the words free indeed in script.

Watercolour heart and moon on upper back

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A woman's upper back shows a tattoo with an outlined heart above a white crescent moon shape left as bare skin. Red, orange and blue washes spread out from the moon, with blue shapes resembling mountains along the lower edge and the words free indeed in thin black script beneath. The loose, bleeding colour and soft edges give it a painted watercolour look, and the composition is centred between the shoulder blades.

Back Heart Moon Mountain Script Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell in the salt tower had cracked the winter my sister stole the madder from the royal vats, and by spring the whole of Cassimer knew her name. I kept the ledgers, so I was the one who knew the numbers: four ounces of red to a town, one drop of blue allowed to the fishwives on feast days, and nothing at all for the sky.

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Ilse did not care about numbers. She took the red down to the harbour wall at dusk and painted the hills the king had ordered left grey, sweeping the wash outward from a moon she left bare, because the decree said the moon belonged to the crown and could not be coloured. She dabbed blue along the ridgeline until the mountains looked as though they were wading out of the sea. Beneath it all she wrote two words in my hand, because mine was the neater script: free indeed.

The guards came at the turn of the tide. I stood between them and the wall with an empty pot in my hands and told the captain that I had done it, that the ledger would show the missing madder under my name. He looked at the painting for a long time. He had a daughter, I think, who had once asked him why the sky was never any colour but grey.

They took my pot and left the wall alone. Next morning the blue had run into the sea and the red had soaked into the stone, but the moon stood out whiter than anything in Cassimer, because no one had been permitted to touch it. Some mornings I still walk down to the harbour and count the faded drops, and I am never sure whether I am counting my sister's crimes or her kindnesses.