Close photograph of a watercolour-style tattoo of orange, pink, purple and teal splashes with black ink spatter, running from the thigh over the knee onto the calf.

Watercolour-style splashes across a leg

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo is made of loose splashes and washes of orange, pink, purple and teal, with black ink spatter and drips scattered across the skin. At the top, a grey, shaded shape with soft edges sits among the colour, while a dark, thin stroke runs down the centre of the design. The design wraps over the knee and the skin is shown under even, natural light against a dark background.

Thigh Calf Paint splash Abstract Ink splatter Brushstroke Drip

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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

Lorna finds you by the squash table, where the paper cups have gone soft at the rims, and says your name the way nobody has since Year Nine. 'You still paint?' she asks. You tell her no, which is true in the way that matters. The last brush you held was in Mr Ashby's art room the spring you were sixteen, when your water pot tipped over a half-finished sketch and you laughed instead of crying.

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He used to say watercolour was the only medium that refused to be bossed. You wet the paper, dropped in orange, then pink, then a bead of black ink from a pipette, and the paper decided where everything went. You hated it for a term and then loved it. That sheet is still folded inside an atlas in your mother's loft, a burst of colour you never finished, because finishing felt like lying.

'Ashby died in January,' Lorna says, and holds out a plastic cup of orange squash as if it might help. You had not known. Across the hall someone is reading names from a clipboard, and a man in a rugby shirt is laughing too loudly at a joke you didn't hear. You take the cup and say the thing you are supposed to say about him, and it comes out smoother than you expect.

Outside, rain has begun on the car park. Each drop lands on the tarmac and spreads into a dark ring, and the rings keep finding each other until the whole lot is one grey sheen. You think of the paper in the loft, the colours bleeding into one another until nobody could say where the orange stopped, and for once you stand at the window and let it run.