Colourful watercolour-style snowflake tattoo with paint splashes on the top of a shoulder, the flake left as pale skin.

Watercolour snowflake on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A white snowflake sits on the top of a shoulder, surrounded by soft washes of pink, orange, yellow, green and blue. The snowflake is left as unpigmented skin, while the colour bleeds outwards in loose blotches and splatter marks. The camera angle runs from the side of the neck across the shoulder, with a dark floral-patterned top visible below.

Shoulder Snowflake Watercolour Paint splash Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo kept her paints in a biscuit tin under the counter of the chemist's in Fenwick Lane, and nobody in the town had ever seen her open it. The children said it held the colours the sky used up in a year. Her nephew, who had come up from the coast to help in the shop, only wanted to know why she sent him out every morning with a bucket to wet the pavement.

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It was March when the snow failed to come. The hills stayed brown, the river shrank to a trickle over its stones, and the old men at the bus shelter talked about the winter as if it were a debt somebody owed them. On the third Sunday Mrs Okonedo knelt on the step, took the tin out, and painted a single snowflake on the back of her own hand with a brush no wider than a hair. She left it white. Then she blew on it, and her nephew swore the flake was still wet when it lifted off her skin and drifted over the rooftops.

Where it came down, the colour came out to meet it. Pink ran out from the bakery sign, green spread across the allotments, and a yellow stain slid down the chapel wall like a dropped yolk. The snowflake itself never took a drop of paint. It hung in the middle of all that wet colour, cold and clean, and the old men said they had never seen the bus shelter so bright.

Nobody in Fenwick Lane could say afterwards which had been painted first, the colour or the snow that was meant to cover it.