Forearm tattoo of a black yin yang style circle with brush strokes and pink and teal watercolour-style splashes.

Yin yang with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A yin yang style circle sits on the inner forearm, with black brush-like strokes forming the dark half and a few small dots near the top. Pink, red and teal splashes spread softly around the circle and fade into the skin toward the edges. The subject is centred against a plain dark background, shown from the front with the wrist visible at the bottom.

Forearm Yin yang Circle Brush stroke Splash Dot

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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

Sit closer, the lamps are down to their night glow and the recycler fans have stopped their singing. You want to know why the great dome of Kelder Ring is black on one side and white on the other? Then listen, because my grandmother told me this in the year the algae tanks went sour, and she never lied to children.

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Her name was Tamsin Achebe, and she painted the bulkheads of the ring with the last tins of ink the supply ship left behind. Black was easy, made from burnt sugar and iron filings scraped off the old hull. The colours she had to beg for. Rose came from the lichen beds on Deck Nine, teal from the tanks, and she thinned them with rainwater caught off the maintenance pipes. Every morning she climbed the scaffold with a brush whose bristles had come from a repair technician's broom. She drew one circle the width of a man's arm, then filled half of it with black strokes that went fast, like someone in a hurry or in a temper.

The council said the dark half was waste, that a station only needed bright paint to keep spirits up. Tamsin said the dark half was where the plants slept, and the light needed somewhere to rest. So she let the pink and teal bleed out from the edges, soft as breath on a window, until the whole ring glowed each time the sun swung round the shade wall.

The year the lights failed, the ring went dark for eleven days. People sat in the black half and waited, and they found they could see the small dots she had placed near the top, catching the emergency glow like stars. When the power came back, Tamsin was long gone, but someone had climbed up and touched one more dot into the black, just where the two halves met. That dot is still there. Look, there, above the hatch. Now off to bed with you, and mind the ladder on your way down.