Side of a torso showing a lettering tattoo of the words Art Is The Weapon, Imagination Is The Ammunition in black type over colourful watercolour splashes on the ribs.

Watercolour splash and quote on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the words "Art Is The Weapon. Imagination Is The Ammunition" set in black serif lettering across three staggered lines. Behind the text are loose watercolour-style splashes in orange, yellow, blue, green and pink, with drips running downward. The photograph is taken from the side, with a black bandeau top covering the upper body.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Watercolour splash Paint splatter Word

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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

Dad kept the quote pinned above the paint locker in his own square capitals, gone soft at the corners from being touched. He'd copied it from a poster at the art school in Penzance, and he never once explained it. He only said it was the one true thing a man could put on a wall in a fishing port, where every wall was going to be wet sooner or later.

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Our boats came in on the Tuesday tide with their names half-flaked off the bows, and I was the one who touched them up. Gull's Promise, Margaret Rose, Ellen Dove. I mixed ultramarine into the grey for the hulls and let a rust red bleed in at the waterline where the sea had got at them, because the men said they wanted their boats to look like they had been somewhere. Nobody told me that was the wrong way to paint a boat. Nobody told me much at all that first winter.

In February the Ellen Dove went out in a blow and came back with her starboard rail stove in and no skipper aboard. Tom Crane was found on the Thursday under the slip with a paintbrush still wedged in his glove. The insurers wanted her made good before they'd look at the claim, so the job came to me, and I stood in the shed with the tins open and the light coming grey through the door.

I did not paint her grey. I flung every colour from the locker at her side the way Dad used to throw the last of the tide at the harbour wall, orange and yellow and a bruised blue, green running down from the rail in long drips. Then I lettered the words across her in black, three lines, staggered, the way he'd taught me. When the adjuster came he stood in front of her for a long time, and then he wrote the claim through without a word.