Traditional style flash drawing of two purple conversation hearts, one reading FOREVER and the other WHAT-EVER, with leaves and a banner at the edges, shown without a body placement.

Conversation hearts reading forever and whatever

Traditional · Colour · Flash

Two purple conversation hearts overlap in the upper left, one labelled FOREVER and the smaller one labelled WHAT-EVER, both drawn with bold black outlines and soft purple shading. Olive and green leaves sit along the bottom edge, and a yellow-green banner with a partial cyan word and red line runs across the right side on a cream background.

Traditional Heart Forever Leaves Banner Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Alfie Quarles had nine weeks of salt beef behind him when the box of conversation hearts turned up at the bottom of his kitbag, squashed flat and smelling of lint. Nessa from the chemist on Duke Street had packed them the morning he sailed out of the Mersey, and he had not opened them since Gibraltar.

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The bosun, Harry Dunne, leaned in the galley doorway with his tea and read the lid upside down. "Forever," he said, then tapped a chalky sweet with a thick finger. "Whatever. Which one's yours?" Alfie told him neither was his. He had kept them because the mess had run out of anything sweet, and because Nessa had written across the lid in biro: Don't you dare eat them all at once.

Harry laughed his short bark of a laugh. "Forty days out and you're sorting sweets into piles." They sorted them anyway, on the steel prep table while the swell walked the pans along the rail. Mostly purple, most of them. The ones with words that could mean anything: CALL ME, SWEET PEA, FOREVER, WHATEVER. Alfie held the FOREVER on his palm until it went warm and tacky.

At the change of watch he pushed the box into the bread bin, taped the lid down and stuck a scrap of paper on top that read For whoever's hungry. He put the FOREVER heart in his shirt pocket, where it would not be eaten. The WHATEVER he left out on the table for Harry, who was already reaching for it, shrugging the way men shrug when they have been given the better half of a joke.