Black ink Traditional-style tattoo of a scalloped heart reading BE NICE with small ornaments above and below, on an upper arm.

Be Nice heart on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black outlined heart with a scalloped border contains the words BE NICE in capitals, with a small pointed ornament at the top and bottom. The linework is solid and even, with no shading, and the tattoo is set against a patterned orange dress sleeve. The arm fills the centre of the frame and the background is softly blurred.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Heart Ornament Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The castle at Harrowmere had lost its roof before anyone in the valley could remember, and its lord had gone with it. What remained was a gatehouse, two towers with their tops broken like bread, and a cold hall where the jackdaws nested. The people below did not go up after dark, though they went up in daylight to gather the blue stones that fell from the walls.

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A girl called Wenna came up one autumn with a basket and a cough, looking for stones for her mother's dye pot. She found a stone above the gate that had been cut into a heart, its letters worn almost smooth. She rubbed them with her thumb until she could read BE NICE, and laughed at the old lord for thinking such a thing needed carving. Then she heard a voice from the well asking for water. It was an old woman, bent double, with no bucket.

Wenna had one flask of thin broth and no reason to share it. She gave it anyway, holding the cup to the woman's mouth as her own mother had done when the cough first came. The woman drank, thanked her, and said the castle would have kept its roof if one soul had been kind to the one before. Then she was gone into the ivy, and the well was only a well.

Wenna went down with her basket full of stones. Her mother never asked where the broth had gone. The heart stone now sits over the door of their cottage, and on cold mornings the village children say the words aloud as they pass, partly to hear them and partly for luck.