Black cursive script reading carry your heart across the upper back near the shoulder blade, with a dark-haired person facing away from the camera.

Cursive "carry your heart" on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of the upper back and shoulder of a person with long dark auburn hair, seen from behind. The black cursive lettering reads carry your heart and runs diagonally across the top of the shoulder blade. The fine, even linework is set against pale skin, with a brick wall and kitchen cabinets blurred in the background.

Lettering Shoulder Back Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pocket was the last thing Hettie Lowe meant to sew, and at ten past eleven on the night before the Pritchard wedding she was still picking at its corners, the kettle gone cold beside the machine. Ray Pritchard had asked for it across her counter in Mold market, sheepish and red at the ears. Inside the left breast of his grey morning coat he wanted a slip of lining, just big enough for a folded letter, stitched so no one would feel it through the wool.

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The letter was from his mother, who had died in March. Ray had not opened it since the funeral. He said he wanted it close on the day, and Hettie, who had buried her own husband four winters back, did not ask what it said. She had her needle, a thimble with a dent in its crown, and the dark grey thread she kept for tailoring. She worked a small running stitch, slow and even, because a hidden seam ought never to look hurried.

By one o'clock the pocket was finished and the coat hung on the back of the door, catching the light from the landing. Hettie tested the slip with two fingers. It held. She turned the lining to check the seam one last time and found, in her own pencil from years before, a measurement written inside the hem of a suit she had made for a man who was now a stranger to her. She left it where it was.

On the morning of the wedding the bell in the parish church started early, and Ray stood in the vestry with his arms out while Hettie brushed the shoulders flat. He did not thank her. He pressed the breast of the coat once with his palm, the way a man checks for his keys. At the door he turned back. "It's still there," he said, and she knew he meant the letter and not the coat. "Keep it close," she told him, "and it will keep its shape."