Black dotwork Claddagh tattoo of a heart held by two hands beneath a crown, shown on the inner forearm.

Claddagh heart and crown on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A Claddagh design shows a heart held between two hands, with a crown above the heart. The linework is fine and dark, and the outline around the motif is built from stippled dots, while the interior is left as bare skin. The design is in black ink only, sits diagonally across the inner forearm, and is photographed against a dark background with a green garment at the left edge.

Dotwork Forearm Heart Hand Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewes had been down in the bottom field since Tuesday, and by Thursday the trough by the gate was a slab of grey ice I had to break with the back of a spade. Dad could not manage the spade any more. He sat in the Land Rover with the heater on and the window cracked, watching me swing, and said nothing about it, which was how he said most things that winter.

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On the Friday the snow came in sideways off the hill and I lost the path twice. When I reached the pens there was a lamb in the straw, half under its mother, not breathing. I rubbed it with a feed sack the way Nan had shown me when I was small, and I talked to it, because there was nobody else to talk to, and somewhere between the second and third breath I found myself saying her name, the way you do with someone who taught you the trick.

Nan had kept her wedding ring on a loop of cord round her neck after her knuckles got too swollen for it. It was a Claddagh, silver gone soft with wear: a heart held between two hands, a crown lifting it. When she died Dad put it in my palm, closed my fingers over it, and said only, "Loyal to the end, that one," before going to see about the kettle.

The lamb coughed. Its mother bawled. I sat back on my heels in the straw with my hands still wet and warm, took the ring out of my pocket, and looked at the two hands holding the heart. For the first time I understood the crown was the easy part. It was the hands that did the work.