Upper arm tattoo of an open mouth and a blue hand in a loose watercolour style with red and blue splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour mouth and hand on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an open mouth with red lips above a blue hand shape, surrounded by loose blue and red splashes and drips. The linework is soft and broken, with colour washes rather than solid outlines, and the ink is bright and saturated against the skin. The tattoo fills the upper arm, with the cropped photo showing a dark striped background behind the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Orrel, beyond the salt marshes, the dyers' guild kept one blue that no one else could make. They pressed it from the petals of a river weed that grew only where the Tanne met the tide, and the recipe passed from mother to daughter because the guild had no sons who could stand the stink. Hild, born with a tongue too thick for words, was given the vats at twelve because nobody else would take them.

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When the old queen came down to the marsh to order a gown the colour of a bruised evening, Hild did not answer her. She dipped her hand into the vat, pressed it flat against a sheet of linen, and lifted it away. The print was blue, with a thread of red madder running through the fingers where she had dragged them. The queen laughed, then stopped, because the cloth looked like a hand still reaching out of it.

The guild wanted Hild punished for wasting good dye. The magistrate, a thin man who had never been spoken to by anyone who did not want something from him, sent for her and asked her to explain the mark. Hild opened her mouth. Only a stain of red came out, the madder she had been chewing for luck, and it ran down her chin in a line like a dropped flower.

The magistrate sighed and reached for his ledger. Hild laid her blue palm on the open page, and the ink bloomed through the paper in a spray of colour. From that day the magistrate wrote every ruling in blue and red, and in Orrel it became the law that no one could be called a liar if their hand had told the truth first.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.