Dotwork-shaded line drawing of an anatomical heart with a small room inside showing a chair and hanging light bulb, with the words YOU LIVE THERE beneath.

Anatomical heart with chair and light bulb

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of an anatomical heart, with a cut-away room inside the lower chamber containing a wooden chair, a hanging light bulb and a wooden floor. The room and the heart's surface are shaded with fine stippled dots and hatching, and the words YOU LIVE THERE sit in capitals below the heart on a pale background.

Dotwork Heart Anatomical heart Light bulb Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Stoke Hollow has stopped waiting for you to speak, so you sit on the roof of Marigold with a tin of pilchards and watch the water turn green under the bridge. Marigold is a narrowboat, eight feet of cabin, and her one room that matters holds a stove, a kettle and a single wooden chair you bought from a skip in Nantwich. Every evening you tell yourself the same thing: you are only moored here until the rent on the flat sorts itself out.

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Mrs Adeyemi from the moorings comes down the towpath with a carrier bag of windfall apples and a flat cap pulled low against the drizzle. She asks where you are sleeping these days. You point at the boat. She shakes her head, taps two fingers against her coat and says, you don't live on a boat, love. You live there. You laugh, because that is the sort of thing people say on canals, and she goes off with her geese trailing behind her like a row of grey umbrellas.

That night the bulb over the table flickers and dies, and you sit in the chair in the dark listening to the water knock against the hull. Your life has been a single room you keep swept and never sit down in, waiting for a better one to be built around it. You stand, lift the chair out through the hatch and set it on the towpath facing the lock, where the moon lays its light across the wood as if someone had left the lamp on for you.

In the morning you carry the chair up to Mrs Adeyemi's gate and leave it against the fence with a note tucked under one leg: come and sit down sometime. Then you walk back, unbolt the hatch and switch on the bulb in the empty cabin, so the window glows gold on the water for anyone passing to see.