Black and white photo of two people embracing, with LOVE tattooed across the knuckles and black-and-grey lettering and a portrait tattoo on the forearms.

Embracing couple with knuckle lettering

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people hold each other closely, with heavily tattooed forearms and hands in the foreground. The tattoos are rendered in black ink with bold lettering on the knuckles, a small heart, and a portrait-style piece on one forearm. The black-and-white photograph uses soft light and a tight crop, with the white tank top filling the lower background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sisters Marrow had never agreed about the wall. Thea kept the rose side and Nan kept the cabbages, and the stone between them was older than either of their names. Thea had written LOVE across her fingers in soot and gall the spring their mother was buried, and Nan, who held that a good woman should be able to hate something, had written HATE on hers in the same black. Neither would wash it off.

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When the blight came in the wet June, the cabbages went first, then the bean rows, and Nan blamed the roses for shading the light. She climbed the wall with a billhook. Thea caught the blade with her left hand, the hand that said LOVE, and held on while Nan pulled. Her knuckles bled into the furrows. Nan's right hand closed over hers, the HATE hand over the LOVE one, and for the length of a long breath neither of them let go.

The old women say the rose was never cut. Where the blood fell the soil went red and then a bitter green, and by Michaelmas a single bramble grew there with leaves shaped like a heart. Nan kept her cabbages and Thea kept her roses, and when the ink on their knuckles faded to grey they could not tell from across the wall which word had been written first.

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