Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a glowing orange and yellow orb with pink, purple and blue streaks across a woman's shoulder and upper chest, with a few small dots to the side.

Watercolour splash with glowing orb on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A watercolour-style tattoo covers the top of a shoulder and spreads towards the upper chest. A soft orange and yellow circle sits at the centre, with pink, purple and blue washes trailing off to the right and small splatters around the edges. Three small solid dots sit to the right on the chest, and the photo is taken against a plain pale wall with the subject's top visible at the bottom.

Shoulder Chest Watercolour Splash Orb Sun Dot Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo sent me up the stepladder on the first wet Tuesday of March with a brush no thicker than a rat's tail and told me the sun was my job. "Not the whole sky, girl. Just the bit that's trying to get out." The shop on Harbour Row sold watercolour cakes to fishermen's wives and to boys who wanted to paint boats, and in the back, behind a curtain of drying paper, he kept a sun in a tin.

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The sun was a cake of cadmium orange gone soft at one edge from the damp. Each morning I wet it with a dropper and lifted a little colour onto a saucer. Pink came from the madder root he ground himself, and blue from a lapis that cost more than the rent. We never painted the sun full. We painted it leaving, the way a thing does when it is sure it will be back by tea.

One February a customer came in with three cockle shells in a paper bag and asked if I could drop them into a wash. He wanted the splash to look like the moment the tide took them. I did it in four strokes, lifting the blue where the water thinned. He paid in coins still warm from his pocket and left the shells on the counter, saying I should keep them, since the sea had been generous to him once and he had nothing else to give back.

I still have them. The orange cake is dust now, and the shop is a phone repair place with a neon sign. But on mornings when the light lies flat over the harbour, I wet my thumb, press it to the cold glass of the window, and watch what the colour does when it has nowhere to go but out.