Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of red, purple, blue, teal and yellow splashes across the outer upper arm of a person outdoors.

Watercolour splash on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large abstract tattoo covers the outer upper arm and shoulder area, made of loose splashes of red, purple, blue, teal, green and yellow. The shading is soft and blended, with bleeding edges and patches of bare skin left as highlights. The colours run from red on the left to teal and green on the right, and the design fills most of the arm against a blurred outdoor background.

Upper arm Abstract Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paprika went first, because I reached for the turmeric without looking and my elbow found the tin instead. Red bloomed across the steel prep top in a shape like a gust of wind, and by the time I had the dustpan out it had already soaked into the grain of the chopping board. Teodor, who was supposed to be on deck scraping rust off the rail, stood in the hatch holding a bucket of seawater and said nothing for a long moment.

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"It's for Mum," he said eventually. "Her birthday. She used to paint the harbour at Whitby when we were kids, all smudged, like the light was running off the page." He looked at the grey wall, the one the company repainted every decade and nobody ever cleaned. "I wanted to give her something that wasn't from a shop."

So we made paint from what the stores had. Red cabbage boiled down for purple, turmeric and a little curry powder for the yellow, a splash of blue food colouring left over from the Christmas icing, and the teal came from mixing that blue with pandan green. We worked until the galley smelled like a Sunday roast and a spice market at once, dabbing with sponges and letting the colours bleed wherever they pleased. The wall took it badly, then beautifully.

When we came into the Humber two days later, the morning sun came through the porthole and lit the wall, and every colour ran a little further into the next, purple into blue, red into the grey, until nobody could say where one stopped. Teodor photographed it on his phone and sent it to his mother before we'd even tied up. She rang back crying, he said, and asked whether the sea was that colour out there. "Only in the mornings," I told him, and went back to scrubbing the board.