Pink and teal watercolour-style heart tattoo with paint splashes on the forearm.

Watercolour heart on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A heart outline in magenta pink sits at the centre of the design, with loose brushstroke edges and a soft wash inside. Teal and blue splashes and droplets spread around the heart and across the lower left, giving a painted, loose effect. The colour is bold and clear against the skin, and the design is set slightly off centre on the forearm.

Forearm Heart Splash Brushstroke Droplet

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down in the shade, you'll want the shade for this one. The road out past Carrow Wells was dust that summer, and the well had gone dry to the bottom, so when the painter came walking in from the east with a tin case on his back, nobody offered him a cup of anything. He was thin as a fence post and smelled of turpentine, and he had three tins of paint and no money at all.

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Nell Parrish kept the water tanker that ran the road. She let him sit in the cab while he talked. He wanted a drink, and she wanted a heart on her door. That was the bargain. So he dipped his brush in the magenta, which was the colour of the lamps in her mother's kitchen, and drew a heart on the tanker's flank in one long pull, the way a man signs a letter he means to keep. Then he flicked the teal across it in sharp little drops, because he said a heart with no water in it is only a stone.

The tanker drove that road for eleven years after. Every time the sun hit the door the pink went pale, but the teal stayed bright, and folk said the blue had been mixed with something from the well. Nobody believed the painter when he said it was only cheap paint.

When the rain finally came to Carrow, it came sideways off the hills and filled the basin in a single night. In the morning Nell walked out onto the flat and found the teal drops had dried in a ring across the salt, the very shape of the splashes on her door. She stood there a long time, then went back for her water.