Two tattoos on a forearm: the word Demolition in black lettering with red splashes and a heartbeat line, and Lovers below with black bats, crossed lines and red hearts.

Demolition and Lovers lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two stacked tattoos show the words Demolition and Lovers in bold black lettering, surrounded by red splashes, drips and a red heartbeat line. Black crossed strokes, small bats and red hearts sit around the words, with the black linework and red fills giving a loose, painterly effect. The two pieces are photographed close up on the inner forearm against a dark background.

Lettering Forearm Heartbeat Heart Bat Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bats had not yet left the rafters when Dougie backed the digger up to the old dairy barn, and you stood in the frost with your hand flat on the cold brick, asking him to wait. Sixty winters of hay dust sifted down through the beam of your torch. Somewhere above, a dozen small bodies shifted and folded tighter, unwilling to be moved.

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Your father had never let anyone touch that barn. He had painted LOVERS on the loft door the summer your mother arrived from Cork, and he had painted DEMOLITION under it the year the milk price fell and he stopped sleeping. You never knew which one he meant. Maybe both. You found the two boards in the snow, half buried, the red paint gone pink with weather, and you carried them to the car without telling anyone.

Dougie brought the bucket down slow, and the first slate slid off with a sound like a dropped plate. The bats rose in a ragged knot, wheeled once over the yard, and went off toward the hedge. Their shadows crossed the snow, fine black cuts of them, and for a moment the whole yard looked like a page someone had scored through in a hurry.

By dusk the roof was open to the sky. You sat on the tailgate with a flask of tea gone lukewarm and the two boards across your knees, reading them the way you read the names on a grave. Then you took a brush from your coat pocket, dipped it in the tin of red, and under the word LOVERS you added the thing your father never managed: one small drop, falling, to mark where the heart had been.