Two forearms side by side: a watercolour-style rainbow arc in red, orange, yellow, green and purple on the upper arm, and a bold black brush-stroke circle on the arm below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour rainbow arc and black brush circle on forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two arms are shown one above the other against a teal background. The upper arm carries a rainbow arc with soft, blended edges and splatter dots, while the lower arm has a solid black brush-stroke circle with a broken edge and small ink spots. The colour arm contrasts with the black and the composition is cropped tightly around the two tattoos.

Forearm Rainbow Brush stroke Circle Arc Splatter Watercolour

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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

Hush now, leave the lamp be, it's only tired. Everyone down here knows the sky went out the winter the salt came up the stairwells, and nobody living has seen colour that wasn't painted on a wall. So listen. Before the dark, there was a sign-painter called Ines Maddox who worked the pier at Harrowgate Deep, lettering tide tables and the names of boats. She had one tin of pigment left, a bit of ochre, a bit of cobalt, and whatever the rust off the hull gave her.

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She mixed them with rainwater in a tea cup and painted an arc across the big glass dome, the way you'd bend a ribbon. The paint would not sit still. It ran down into violet and orange and a red like a split lip, and it dripped in little spatters that stuck to the glass where the children pressed their faces. Every morning they came down the stairs to see whether the arc had held. Most mornings it had lost another finger's width.

Then the press that printed the tide tables seized, and Ines took its ink, thick and black as the trench, and stood on the cold grating with a brush as wide as her hand. She drew one stroke round in a circle, quick, and lifted before she closed it, so there was a broken place at the bottom where the water could get through. Ink flew off the end like sparks. She said the arc was too pretty to float on nothing, and it needed something to hold the edges, a rim, the way a bowl holds soup.

The arc is still there, if you look at the wall above the hatch. The circle is what kept it. Count the ink spots on the grating, one for every child who came down that winter. I could never get past nine, so the rest are yours to find.