Black single-line design of the word love forming a heart outline, with a volleyball drawn in the letter o, on a grey gradient background.

Continuous line love heart with volleyball

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A continuous black line drawing spells out the word love, with the letters looping to form the outline of a heart. A volleyball with simple curved seam lines sits within the o, and the line ends in a loop at the bottom of the heart. The uniform black strokes sit on a soft grey gradient that brightens toward the centre.

Lettering Love Heart Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net has sagged between the plum trees since the spring you pegged it up, and now the wasps have found the windfalls beneath it. You stand at the kitchen window with the ball cupped in both hands, its leather gone soft and grey along the seams, and you think about how Nan used to say you could tell a good ball by how it sat in your palm before you ever threw it.

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She taught you to bump when you were eleven, forearms locked and knees bent, the ball rising off your wrists as if it had somewhere better to be. She never called it a game. She called it keeping something in the air. She would stand under the plums with an apron full of pegs and count your touches out loud, until the numbers got too big to hold and she gave up and simply said, well, that'll do.

The summer after she died, you tried to count them yourself and lost track by twelve. The ball went over the net, came back, went over again, and you kept going until the light turned the colour of weak tea and the wasps went home. Nobody was on the other side. You didn't need anybody there.

This morning you pull a length of garden twine from the shed, loop it through the old seam, and tie the ball to the lowest branch of the nearer tree. It turns slowly in the still air, catching the sun on each curved line, and you leave it there, knotted tight enough to hold.