Close photo of a small molecule tattoo on a shoulder, with black outlines and soft blue and pink watercolour fills in its rings.

Watercolour molecule tattoo on shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a ball-and-stick molecular diagram with two fused six-sided rings and a chain of bonds ending in a black dot. The outlines are black and fairly clean, while the ring interiors are filled with loose blue and pink watercolour-style wash. It sits on the upper back of the shoulder against a dark background, with a dark top visible at the left edge.

Shoulder Molecule Chemical structure Hexagon Ring

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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

The ferry is late again, so you sit on the harbour wall at Skarra with the schoolmaster's chemistry book open across your knees, its spine cracked at the page where the rings begin. Nobody on the island has ever asked what a hexagon is for. Your grandmother calls it a waste of good ink, and she is not wrong about the ink.

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You draw the molecule again in the margin, the way you have every evening since the book arrived in a crate of tinned peaches. Six sides, then a fused partner, then a tail of bonds that ends in a dot you press hard so it bleeds into the paper. Where the lines are darkest you fill the rings with what the island gives you: beetroot for the pink, and the blue from crushed mussel shell that Old Tam swears by. The colour soaks outward at the edges, like weather coming in over the water.

The ferry finally noses into the bay, low in the water, and a man you have never seen steps onto the quay with a canvas bag and asks for the lighthouse road. He has a book too, a newer one, and when he opens it he shows you the same drawing with the dot in a different place. He says the schoolmaster drew it wrong on purpose, years ago, so that only someone who had sat with the page long enough could correct it.

You do not hand the book back. You tell him the ferry can wait one more tide. You bend over the margin with the last of the beetroot, and the tail of bonds finally reaches the edge of the page, where the paper ends and the sea begins.