Watercolour-style yin yang tattoo in blue and orange-red splashes running vertically across the skin of the back.

Watercolour yin yang splash on the back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A yin yang symbol sits at the centre of a vertical splash of paint, with the blue half bleeding into the orange-red half. Soft gradients and loose drips create a watercolour effect, with fine speckles scattered around the main shape. The tattoo is shown in close, straight-on framing against plain pale skin.

Back Yin yang Splash Droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The lorry never made it up the Hardknott side, so we unloaded the paint at the refuge and carried it up ourselves. Four tins of signal blue, three of the vermilion Mr Okafor insisted on for the chapel sign, and the orange you said was a waste of money. I am writing this on the step with my boots still wet, because something happened on the bend below the cairn that I want to tell someone who will not laugh.

A gust took the top tin off the tailgate and it burst open on the scree. Blue ran one way, red the other, and where they met on the wet slate they would not stay apart. Rain did the rest. The colours bled into each other the way the wash does in your sketchbooks, soft at the edges, with long threads of drips running down the rock.

Here is the odd part. Right at the centre, where the blue had curled round the red like a cat round a fire, the shape closed itself into a circle with a small dot of each colour sitting in the other. I stood there in the drizzle like a fool, looking at it, and thought of Grandad's old tea caddy with the black and white fish chasing each other around its lid.

I could have scraped it up. Instead I left it. By morning the rain had thinned it to a pale stain on the grey, and the sheep will walk through it by midday until it is gone. The chapel sign can be painted in the valley. Come up in the summer if you want to see what the pass looks like when it has been given something to hold.

Love, Nell