Colour traditional tattoo on an arm of two candy-style hearts reading NOT and YOURS, with stars, dots and a small heart above an open book.

Candy hearts saying NOT YOURS on an arm

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

Two candy-style hearts, one pink with the word NOT and one blue with the word YOURS, sit above a small red heart resting on an open book with curled scrolls. Stars, sparkles and scattered dots fill the skin around them. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat colour and light shading on the hearts, and the design spreads across the full frame of the photo.

Traditional Other Heart Star Sparkle Open book Dot Swirl Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sweets came from the pier kiosk, a paper bag of conversation hearts gone soft in the August heat, and Mrs Pargeter swore they were the last thing Edie would ever be allowed to take from the jar. You had already sorted them by colour across the candlewick bedspread when the knock came: two pinks, a blue, and a dozen chalky ones nobody had asked for. Room Four looked out over the harbour wall, and its radiator knocked like a guest who wanted to be let in.

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Edie had been courting a lifeguard called Tommy Vane since Whitsun, which the whole Seabreeze knew because he whistled the same three bars of a dance tune every time he passed the front window. You had watched it from the stairs. Last night he had left a ring of sea glass on the windowsill with a note tucked under it, and you had tried to be pleased for her and had mostly managed. Now you turned the blue heart over with your thumbnail and wondered what a sweet could ever promise.

The book came from the reading room downstairs, where the landlady kept a visitors' register bound in green cloth. You copied the words out in pencil, NOT for the pink and YOURS for the blue, and slipped the page under the sea glass. Edie found it at breakfast, laughed so hard she choked on her toast, then went very quiet and asked whose handwriting it was.

From the harbour wall that afternoon you watched Tommy work the sands with a bucket, crouching at every rock pool as if the sea might have left him a message. He glanced up at the boarding house and lifted a hand. You kept your own hands in your pockets, and the gulls fought over a dropped pink heart on the stones between you.