Two forearms with matching watercolour tattoos in rainbow colours, a painted heart shape with droplets on the left and an open heart with rainbow splashes on the right, on the forearm.

Watercolour rainbow hearts on two forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms rest together, one wearing a green scrub top, showing two rainbow watercolour tattoos. The left arm has a multicoloured brushstroke heart shape with small red and green droplets around it. The right arm has an uncoloured heart left as bare skin, surrounded by rainbow strokes that fade and spatter outwards, with soft blended edges and vivid colour throughout.

Forearm Heart Rainbow Watercolour splash Droplet Brushstroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin of lemon yellow had been my father's, and he never once let me use it on a boat. Nobody at the Scarborough yard painted with that colour, he said, because the sea eats yellow first. So when the Lark came in with her hull stove on the Dogger Bank and I was left with the name board to redo, I mixed the rainbow on the lid of the tin instead, stroke by stroke, the way you test a brush on a wet palette before you trust it.

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Mrs Okonedo from the chandlery brought her grandson down to watch. He wanted the heart. I told him a heart in paint was easy but a heart in water was not, because the colours run before you can stop them. So I worked fast. Red pulled upward like rain going the wrong way, then orange, yellow, the green that looks like the inside of a bottle, blue, and violet bleeding off the edge into spatter. I left the middle white. Bare board, the plain bones of the thing.

He asked why the heart was empty. I said that was where the crew's names would go once she was launched, but I hadn't told the owners yet, and I hadn't told myself either. When the Lark came back in May with new planks and the paint still tacky, I was up the ladder with a brush in my teeth, and the boy had brought a tub of glass droplets from the bead shop: red, green, a few clear ones that caught the light like sea water in a jar.

We lettered the names that night in small careful capitals inside the white. Then Tomas, the mate, pressed a single green drop onto the last line, and it held, the way colour does once it has decided to stay.