Pink, purple and blue watercolour-style wash tattoo running down the inside of a forearm, with bare legs and white bedding behind it.

Watercolour wash tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pink, violet and lilac watercolour-style wash covers the inner forearm, running from near the wrist towards the elbow. The edges are soft and feathered with splatter marks, and a pale blue and orange wash sits near the top. The arm rests on a white bed with bare legs and bedding in the background, shot from above in soft natural light.

Forearm Watercolour Wash Splatter Abstract Pink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tully had already run out of blue by the third week of September, so when the lodger from number nine asked for a sky she gave him the sea instead. That was how the trouble started, or how the village liked to tell it afterwards: the boarding house on Gannet Row had a paint box nobody used, and a visitor who could not sleep.

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He came down at five each morning to the back step, where the light rose off the water in long pink strokes, and he tried to get it onto paper. Every sheet went damp and bled. Violet ran into lilac, lilac into a grey that was almost a bruise. Mrs Tully watched him from the scullery window and said nothing, because she knew that colour only settles where it is wanted.

On the last morning of his stay he dipped the brush in the rinse water from the sink, a cloudy mix of madder root and the orange she dried from marigolds for tea. He painted one wash across the inside of his own arm, from the wrist towards the elbow, and flicked the bristles so the drops fell where they liked. By noon the tide had come in and gone out, and the wash was still there, soft at the edges, refusing to fade.

Mrs Tully never told him the rest. She moved the paint box to the top shelf and, when the next lodger asked about the stain, said it was the sea keeping a promise. The villagers say it still turns up at the end of summer, pale blue near the wrist, bright as a gull's breast, and nobody has ever managed to wash it off.