Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross, heart and anchor on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand and forearm show a thin, single-line tattoo of a cross, a heart and an anchor. The heart sits in the centre, with the cross passing through its top and the anchor's shank and arms curving around its base. The image is black and white and has a plain dark background, so the outlines stand out clearly.

Fine line Forearm Cross Heart Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Gannet House had been dead since Tuesday, so Nell Harrower took the stairs with a tin of pale blue paint under one arm and her knees complaining at every landing.

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On the fourth-floor window, someone had drawn in black marker: a cross passing through the top of a heart, and an anchor whose arms curled round its base. It was all one line, the pen never lifted, the way a child draws when he is trying to prove something. She knew the hand. Kit Dunmore, nine years old, had lived on the eleventh floor until his father took him to Hull last spring, and he had spent his last week on these stairs asking her whether a heart could be held down by an anchor or lifted up by a cross. She had told him it could be both. He had not believed her.

She set the tin down and pulled the rag from her back pocket. The letter from the housing committee was folded in her coat: every mark on the common parts to be removed before the inspection on Friday. Her thumb hovered over the glass. The drawing was crooked and too big for the pane, and it had been there long enough that the city's grime had settled into its grooves, so it looked less like graffiti and more like something the building had grown.

She wet the rag and cleaned around the drawing, working slowly in small circles until the glass was clear on every side of it. Then she opened the tin and painted the rest of the window, the frame and the wall beneath, and left the little black knot of cross, heart and anchor exactly where it was. When she carried the tin on up towards the fifth floor, the paint was still tacky and the stairwell smelled of thinners, but the one line she had not touched was still looking out over the car park.