Colourful watercolour-style yin yang tattoo with a crescent moon and paint drips on the forearm.

Yin yang with watercolour drips on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A yin yang symbol sits within a loose wash of colour. The black half holds an orange and red glow around a white crescent moon, while the white half is filled with pink, blue and yellow washes. Black ink drips and spatter run down from the base of the circle and across the surrounding skin, and the soft, blended shading gives a painted watercolour effect.

Forearm Yin yang Moon Watercolour Drip Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint tins have sat in the bosun's locker since Lisbon, and by the third week out you have stopped pretending the hull will ever be finished. Each morning you climb the stage over the side with a brush tucked in your belt and a rag for the drips, and each evening the Atlantic quietly takes back what you put on. Ruairi, who has painted this ship four times, says a hull is never finished, only paused between weather.

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Tonight you have the middle watch alone. The sky is split down the middle, one half thick with cloud the colour of old ink, the other half a dirty rose where the sun went down behind you. Someone has left a tin of white on the rail, and you dip a finger in and press a crescent onto the dark side of the funnel, the way your grandmother used to chalk a moon on the back of the kitchen door so the boats could find their way home. Where the paint runs, it leaves long thin tears down the grey steel.

At four bells the wind backs and a swell lifts the bow, and a tin of teal goes over the side and splashes the stage. You swear, reach for the rope, and miss. Ruairi finds you at dawn with your sleeve dripping, looking at the blue streak that has run from the rail to the waterline. "It'll dry," he says. "Or the sea will have it. Either way it's finished now." You stand back and see it: the black of the hull, the pink laid on yesterday, the teal running down like ink from a brush that has been rinsed too many times.