Fine line tattoos on an upper arm showing a outlined cloud with falling hearts and a coloured unicorn, with partly visible script above.

Cloud, hearts and unicorn on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of an upper arm bearing several fine line tattoos. A small outlined cloud sits above a trail of tiny hearts, and a unicorn with a rainbow mane and pastel-toned linework sits lower down near the elbow. Partly visible script above is in black ink, and the background shows green grass and a person's hair and patterned clothing.

Fine line Upper arm Cloud Heart Rain Unicorn Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came to Carrow Isle in the third week of March, and it was not water. Maeve Tallan ran out of the byre with a bucket and found the yard full of small grey hearts, warm as pebbles, piling against the gate. Her grandmother told her to leave them be, because the cloud over the north headland had been sulking since the old laird drowned, and a sulking cloud will weep whatever it has.

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Maeve did not leave them. She filled three baskets and carried them down to the shore, where the sea had gone flat and pale. Out past the skerry a white horse stood in the shallows, its mane running with colours no dye-works in Stromness could match. It watched her set the baskets down. When she stepped back it came up the sand, lowered its horn to the nearest basket, and ate the hearts one by one, slowly, as if tasting a grief it had been waiting to be rid of.

Its mane grew brighter with each heart. By the time the baskets were empty, the cloud had thinned to a single curl above the headland, and the horse was the colour of a mackerel's back. "Now you owe me a song," it said, in a voice like wet rope. Maeve had no song. She sang the only thing she knew, a sheep-counting rhyme her mother used at lambing, and the horse laughed until the gulls lifted off the rocks.

The cloud never came back to Carrow. Nobody has seen it since, though every March a single grey heart turns up in the bottom of a fishing creel, and the old women say the horse has come to collect the rest of its fee.