Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Companion cube with red hearts

Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey, cube-shaped companion cube from the video game Portal, with a red heart on each of its two side panels. Several smaller red hearts float around the cube against pale skin. The cube uses dark outlines and soft shading to give it a rounded, three-dimensional look, while the hearts are flat red shapes with slight highlights.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Hob Fell road for three days, and the Crooked Stile Inn had run out of everything except soup and patience. Nell Pargeter was dragging a grey metal cube across the flagstones of the back room when Dev, the only other guest still awake, looked up from his crossword and asked why she was taking the furniture for a walk.

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"It's not furniture. It's the box the sign came in," she said, which was a lie. The cube had been left behind by a hiker named Corran, who had checked out at dawn and walked into the drifts with his rucksack and no explanation. On each of its two side panels someone had painted a red heart, slightly wonky, in the sort of enamel you find on a bicycle. Nell had decided it was rubbish. Now she found she couldn't put it in the bin.

Dev set his pencil down. He said his grandmother had kept a tin of buttons she never sewed with, and that nobody throws away things that have been loved in a particular direction. Nell thought about how the cube had sat on the bench by the fire all evening, turned so the hearts faced the room. Outside, the wind shoved snow against the window in long pale handfuls.

In the morning the road was open. Nell found the cube still by the fire, hearts facing the door, and a note tucked under one corner in Corran's careful capitals: LOOK AFTER HER, SHE DOESN'T LIKE THE COLD. Nell laughed, put the kettle on, and set the cube on the windowsill where the low sun came through. She didn't move it again.