Small blue heart made of stylised waves tattooed on the neck behind the ear, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue wave heart behind the ear

Neck · Colour · Photo

A small heart formed from stylised curling waves sits on the neck just behind the ear. The linework is dark blue and outlines the shapes, while the fill uses several shades of bright blue to create soft shading within the waves. The rest of the photo is greyscale, so the blue tattoo is the only colour and stands out clearly against the skin and hair.

Neck Heart Wave Water Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairead had been dipping cloth in the indigo vat since before the tide turned, and her hands had gone the colour of the bay. Her uncle shouted from the lane that the Rosie Ann was back early and wanted her ledger. She wiped her palms on her apron and did not hurry. The vat would not wait, and neither, she had learned, would the sea.

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The cloth came out of the dye green, then blue, then a deeper blue as the air caught it. She had stitched a pattern into it with waxed thread, a breaking wave curled over on itself until it made a heart. Her mother had worked the same pattern into her father's shirts, and he had gone out in one of them the autumn Mairead turned nine and had not come back up the slip.

Tom Garvey, the Rosie Ann's skipper, came up the lane with a parcel wrapped in oilcloth. Inside was a shirt, the blue gone pale at the cuffs, a tear mended with small careful stitches. "Snagged on a creel off the point," he said. "Thought you'd want to know someone's still tending it." She turned the collar over and found her own knot, the one she had believed the water had taken.

She pinned the new cloth to the line beside the old and watched them lift together in the wind off the harbour. The dye would hold, she told herself, as long as nobody left it out in the rain. Then, because the tide was coming in and the vat needed stirring, she went back down to work, leaving two blues and one heart drying side by side.