Anatomical heart line drawing

The trouble started when Ronnie Vane, who had been courting her sister for three summers without once saying what he wanted, asked to borrow it. He meant to take it to a studio in Caistor and have it inked onto his forearm, so the girl would know what he was made of. Dorothy said no. Ronnie said a drawing belonged to nobody, it was only lines. She said that was precisely why he could not have it. Lines on paper could be rubbed out, and a man could not.

So he took it anyway, one wet Tuesday while she was counting stamps. Dorothy found the empty pin at closing and sat on a sack of parcels and cried, which she never once did in front of customers. Then she did the sensible thing. She sat up with a lamp and a sheet of carbon and redrew the heart from memory, the aorta curling up like a stiff ribbon, the ridges shaded with the flat of the pen. When Ronnie came back a month later with his arm wrapped in cling film, the ink carried her wobble in the top vessel, the one she had never managed to get right.

Ronnie never knew whose hand had drawn the wobble. The bride laughed at it and married him anyway, and Dorothy kept the original pinned above the stamp rack until the day she died. So raise your glasses to the happy pair, and to every crooked line that stays put.