Two forearms with watercolour-style heart tattoos in blue, green, red and yellow, one heart outlined and one filled, shown on the forearms.

Watercolour hearts on two forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a heart tattoo in a loose watercolour style. The left heart is an outline with paint-like splashes of green, yellow, red and blue spreading outward, while the right heart is filled with blue, green and red washes. Dark linework borders both hearts, and a small patch of script is partly visible on the right arm.

Forearm Heart Watercolour Splash Script

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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

Pull the stool under the awning, love, the rain's coming through the cloth again and I'll not shout over it. You want the tale of the paint barrow at the bottom of Fleet Row? Every trader on that corner in the wet years knew it, though nobody sold a thing there once the flood took the gutters.

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Old Hal Bramwell kept that barrow, full of watercolour pans and cracked saucers, and two boys came every Thursday to mix colours they couldn't afford. Ivo was the quick one, always lifting his brush before the paint had decided what it wanted to be. Tam was slow and stubborn and would sooner spoil a sheet than let it go. They argued about everything, mostly about whether green was a proper colour or only blue that had lost its nerve.

One afternoon the sky opened over the market and they ran for the shutter of the closed ironmonger's, the only dry wall on the row. Tam drew a heart in one dark line, and Ivo, laughing, wet his brush and dropped colour into it, red, then yellow, then green. The rain did the rest. It ran down the shutter and pushed the paint outward in long bleeding arms, while Tam's outline stayed exactly where he had put it, stubborn as he was.

Hal said afterwards that the rain had settled what the boys never could. Nobody could say which colour had gone on first, or where one heart stopped and the other began. The ironmonger repainted the shutter the next spring, but the bloom came back through every coat whenever it rained, and in the end he gave up and let it be.