Watercolour style tattoo on the ankle showing a blue police box outline beside a dark swirling circular motif, with blue, purple and pink washes.

Watercolour police box and swirl on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a blue police box outline on the left, drawn with fine black lines, beside a large dark-outlined circle filled with curling swirls. Soft blue, purple and pink watercolour splashes spread around both motifs and bleed past the linework. Colour dominates the design, with black used mainly for the outlines, and the composition sits on the outer ankle above a light sock.

Ankle Police box Circle Swirl Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bus had gone past the depot at twenty to one, and I was still on my knees in the gutter of Pellow Lane, working a bent screwdriver under a stubborn drain grate, when the blue box appeared at the kerb behind me. Its lamp was dark. Its paint looked like something left out in the rain, blue bleeding into violet at the edges, and one side was bare grey brick where the colour had never quite reached.

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I expected a lock. Instead the door swung out on its own, and the inside was a long room lit by a hundred sheets of wet paper hanging from lines, each one dripping onto a floor of coloured puddles. A man in a coat the colour of dishwater looked up from a tin of pigment and said, without any greeting, "You're the one who keeps lifting the grates. Could you stop? The rain's been running uphill." Then he pressed a small black-ringed disc into my palm, cool as a coin, with a whorl of curling lines drawn across its face like a fingerprint that had learned to dance.

I asked how to get home. He said the way out was the way I'd come in, but only if I dropped the disc into the first puddle I saw. He said it kindly, the way you'd give directions to someone who had been lost a long time. I did as he said. The lane outside was not the lane I knew. Every gutter shone violet and turquoise, and the disc sent a ring of pink racing out under the streetlamps, past the shuttered chemist and up the hill towards the sleeping houses.

By dawn the grate was clear, the bins were full of washed-out light, and the box had gone. I still have a curl of wet paper folded in my jacket. Some mornings, when the tram bell rings across the river, it feels faintly warm, as if someone on the other side is still trying to finish the colour.