Black line drawing of a hand holding a letter envelope with a red heart, leaves and the words I'll love you forever, in a traditional flash style on torn paper.

Envelope, heart and leaves flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A hand holds an open envelope with a red heart at its centre, with leaves sprouting from one side and the words I'll love you forever above and if I ever love at all below. The design uses bold black outlines, dotted shading and short hatch marks, with a single red fill on the heart. The composition is centred on a torn sheet of paper placed on a dark surface.

Traditional Envelope Heart Hand Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope came back to the sorting office on a wet Tuesday, its flap steamed open and sealed again with someone else's tape, and Dorothy Hale read the front twice before she turned it over. It was addressed in her own hand to Arthur Quill, Flat 4, Dock Street, a man who had left Hull for Grimsby in 1987 and had never once answered anything she sent him.

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Inside was a single sheet folded in three. Across the top, in the green ink she had bought from a stall in Whitby, she had written I'll love you forever. Underneath, smaller, as though she had lost her nerve halfway down the page, was the second line: if I ever love at all. She had been twenty-two. She had thought the second line was the clever part.

She pinned the letter to the board above the kettle and told the others it was a dead letter, which was true in its way. Ruth from the parcels room read it over her shoulder and said that a hedge like that was just a door left open so you could walk out of it with your dignity. Dorothy said nothing. She was thinking of the leaves she had drawn in the margin, the little hand holding the envelope, and how carefully she had made the heart red so nobody could mistake it for an afterthought.

At closing she took the letter down, found a second-class stamp in the drawer, and posted it again to Dock Street. Then she sat in the empty hall with her coat on and wrote one more line on the back, small enough to fit between the stamp and the postmark: still considering.