Traditional colour tattoo on a forearm showing a couple's faces in a red heart, with banners reading 'To die by your side' and 'Such a heavenly way', a blue flower spray and a hanging noose.

Couple in heart banner with noose on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A traditional-style tattoo shows a man and a woman facing each other inside a red heart, framed by grey banners with lettering and a rope border. Below the heart sits a spray of blue and green flowers and a hanging noose drawn in brown rope. The work uses bold black outlines, solid flat fills and smooth shading, with the photograph taken close up against a paper towel background.

Traditional Forearm Couple Heart Banner Lettering Rope Flower Rose Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Margate believed the rope was for hanging washing. Lil Mercer had bought forty feet of it off a bankrupt ship's chandler the week Stan Hopper asked her to marry him on the pier, and she tied the first knot in her kitchen while he was still on one knee, pretending to look for a dropped penny.

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"Looks like a hangman's knot to me," said Mrs Dewhurst from behind the tea urn at the gallery, the first summer they opened. Lil told her it was a bowline, the knot that held a boat to a quay without slipping, and that she and Stan had never needed anything grander. Stan had painted a red heart on the tin sign above the shooting range, with a hymn line his mother liked curling round it in grey letters, and the sailors from the Ramsgate boats thought it was the best advertisement on the front.

In the August gale of 1953 the awning tore free and went cartwheeling over the promenade. Stan climbed the ladder with a bowline round his waist and the other end belayed to the gallery's iron post, while Lil shouted up at him that he looked like a fool and a hero at once. He came down soaked and grinning, holding a length of canvas like a flag, and the rope had not so much as stretched.

Forty years on the rope still hangs from the beam inside the gallery, its fibres gone soft and grey. Lil's granddaughter fills a tin heart with wrapped toffees and clips it to the bowline, and children pulling at it for a sweet never once ask why it looks like a hangman's knot.