Traditional style colour tattoo of an anatomical heart pierced by a dagger, with a banner reading Live through the pain, on the upper arm.

Dagger-pierced heart with banner on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A red anatomical heart is pierced by a dagger with a brown handle and grey blade, with small blood drops around it. A yellow banner across the lower half reads LIVE THROUGH THE PAIN, and a dagger tip extends below the heart with more drops. Bold black outlines, red and yellow fills and soft shading give it a classic flash look, centred on the upper arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The knife had gone in below the ribs of the red heart the summer the miller's boy went into the woods and did not come out, and nobody in Thornwick would pull it free. Old Ada Fenn said a blade drawn from a living thing only lets the blood out faster. So she left it, and she walked the edge of the beech wood every morning with her basket of eggs and her stick, calling the boy's name the way you call a dog.

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The banner she painted herself on the lintel board of the forge, in yellow ochre, because those were the words her mother had said over her own bad fever: live through the pain, girl, pain is only the road. The villagers thought it a strange motto for a smithy. They came anyway, with cracked hinges and sick cows, and they stood under the words while the bellows roared.

On the ninth morning a wren landed on the forge step with a scrap of blue wool in its beak, the same blue as the miller's boy's coat. Ada followed it into the beeches, stick in one hand and the eggs forgotten on the wall, and she found him sitting against a root with a splintered leg, singing to himself so the silence would not win.

She carried him out on her back before the dusk came down. The blade stayed in the forge, and the painted heart stayed over the door, and when people asked why she never took it down she only said the thing still needed doing, and went back to her hammer.

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