Black line drawing of a heart with a curled swirl, the word family in script lettering inside it, and a loop at the base, shown as a design with no skin visible.

Family script inside a swirl heart design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a heart with a spiral curl at the upper left and a looped tail at the bottom. The word family is written in a slanted script across the centre of the heart. The image is black on white with no shading, and the lines are of even weight with a slightly pixelated, stitch-like edge.

Lettering Heart Family Script Swirl Loop Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hear me, children, while the fire still has its teeth. My grandmother's grandmother rowed the river at Hesper's Bend with a single rope looped round her wrist, and every morning she tied it to the stake by the reed beds so the current could not carry her off. The rope had no end, only a curl where the fibre doubled back on itself, and the village said it was the knot that kept the boats from drifting into the marsh.

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When the flood came in the year the river turned black, the boatmen fled uphill. Only Ysolde stayed, because her three brothers were still out on the water counting the fish traps by lantern. She wound the rope about her hips and leaned into the wind, calling their names one after another, and the wind carried each name back to her in a voice that was not quite the wind's. The brothers heard her and turned their prows toward the sound, and the rope pulled taut between the stake and the bank, and every one of them came home along it.

That is why we tie the loop at the bottom of the rope, the tail that dips down through the crossing, and why the old women still write the word for kin across the middle of the heart before they stitch it onto a child's shawl. The curl is where the rope turns back to hold. The tail is where it reaches down for whoever has fallen in. Ysolde's brothers lived to be grey, and each of them could tell you, if you asked them plainly, that they never once felt the water take them.