Back of a person with a sketchy, watercolour-style tattoo of clothes pegged on a washing line and a figure, in black linework with blue, pink and green washes.

Watercolour washing line across the back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back shows a large tattoo of loose black linework with watercolour-style washes in blue, pink, green and red. Motifs include a washing line with pegged clothes across the upper back, a hanging garment, a stylised standing figure and a small bird-like shape. The ink fades into the skin with soft colour splashes, and the composition runs diagonally from the shoulder blade towards the top of the back.

Fine line Back Figure Bird Watercolour Sketch Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Monday the lines went up between the mill houses, and every Monday Agnes Pardoe stood at the top of Coal Lane pegging out her husband's shirts and listening for the fiddle. The dance hall stood across the beck, and on wet nights the music came over the water like something blown off a shelf.

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Her youngest, Nell, had gone across with a borrowed red dress and not come home. Agnes kept pegging. Each morning a sleeve or a stocking was missing from the line, and each evening a new piece hung there in its place, blue as the beck in February, pinned up by someone who had not been asked.

On the seventh Monday a small grey bird settled on the top wire and sang three notes that were exactly the notes of a hymn Agnes had taught her. She followed it along the line to the hall door. Inside, the boards were wet with dancing, and the fiddler was not a man at all. Nell was turning in the middle of the floor, the red dress hanging off her like washing, and she laughed when she saw her mother.

"The hall has no line," she said. "Nothing dries here." Agnes took the pegs from her apron and fixed the dress to the rafters, one peg at each corner, and the bird flew out satisfied. Every Monday after that the village lines carried a little more colour than the weather allowed, and nobody in Coal Lane ever asked where the blue came from.