Back view of a pair of legs with colourful watercolour-style tattoos, a tree-like splash on the left calf and a bird among splashes on the right knee.

Watercolour splash tattoos on the legs

Calf · Colour · Photo

The photo shows the backs of a pair of legs in denim shorts. The left calf has a pink, blue and green splashed shape with thin dripping lines running down towards the ankle, and the right leg has a bird in flight with loose splashes of pink and green around the back of the knee. The ink uses soft, painterly edges with no outlines, and the plain grey wall and wooden floor keep the focus on the colours.

Calf Thigh Bird Tree Splash Abstract Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jam jars of wash had gone tacky on the potting-shed sill, and Nell Dacre kept picking at a flake of dried paint on her thumb while her grandmother argued with the wasps. Gran had painted the old Bramley every August since before Nell's mother was born, a tree so heavy with fruit that its lower branches dipped into the long grass. This year she wanted it in colour that ran.

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Nell had mixed the pinks herself, rose madder bleeding into viridian, and they dripped down the paper where the bark should have been. Gran said the drips were the sap leaving. She said it the way she said most things, without looking up, one eye half shut against the low sun coming through the Cox's leaves.

On the last Saturday the swifts came screaming over the top orchard, a dozen of them stitching the sky together, and Gran flicked her brush at the window. A blot of blue shot across the glass like a bird that had changed its mind. "There," she said. "Now it's flying." Nell laughed and then didn't, because the blot was already drying into the exact shape of a wing, and her grandmother had never once in her life painted anything by accident.

They carried the sheet down to the gate that evening and propped it on the stile. The wind came up the hill and lifted one corner, and for a moment the swift in the top corner looked as if it meant to take the whole tree with it.