Traditional style flash drawing in colour of a blue envelope with red flowers, green leaves and two red hearts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Envelope with flowers and hearts

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a tattoo design showing a blue envelope with yellow scalloped edges on its flap and sides. Two red flowers with yellow centres and green leaves sit on the envelope, and a red heart appears on each side. Bold black outlines and soft grey shading on the envelope are set against a plain off-white paper background.

Traditional Envelope Flower Heart Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry had not run for three weeks when Maren found the envelope wedged under the chapel step on Inish Carrig, blue as the sound on a fair day and sealed with a red flower. Nobody on the island could read the hand on the front, so she carried it up the hill to Tom Keane, who kept the post in the back room of his shop and had kept it since before she was born.

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Tom turned it over twice and set it on the counter. The address was for a man named Daniel Cahill, who had rowed off to the mainland at seventeen and never come back, and the sender had drawn two small hearts on the side of the paper, one in each corner, as if they had run out of room for kisses. "The flap's still stuck," Tom said. "Nobody opens the post on this island. That's not ours to do." So they waited for the Thursday boat, and half the island came down to look at it: the baker with flour on his hands, the schoolmistress with her spectacles pushed up into her hair.

Maren took it across herself in the spring, when the sound was calm enough for a currach. At the mainland harbour a clerk in a wool coat read the name, then the postmark, and sighed. "Cahill died in March," he said. "His sister wrote every year, bless her. We kept sending them back." He held the flower up to the light for a long while, the red of it bright against the blue.

He did not open it. He slid it into the breast of his coat instead, flower facing out, and said the boat would run again on Thursday. Maren rowed home with the tide behind her and did not look back at the harbour.