Black and grey shaded drawing of a feather quill dipping into a heart-shaped ink pot, with the word Love in script beneath it, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Feather quill and heart ink pot design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded drawing of a feather quill rising from a heart-shaped ink pot, with a curled feather tip at the top and soft swirling shadows behind it. The feather uses fine pencil-like hatching and dark outlines, while the ink pot is filled with a dark brown-black fill at its base. The word Love is written in a flowing script at the lower left.

Lettering Realism Feather Quill Heart Love Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the lamp, the lot of you, and mind the cat. You want to hear about my grandfather's trade? He wrote letters on the Scarrow quay for men who could not hold a pen without it shaking, and for wives who had learned their letters only far enough to find a name on a notice board. Four pence a page. Two pence if you brought your own paper, which nobody ever did.

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He kept a heart-shaped ink pot on the windowsill, glazed the colour of wet slate, with a quill he had cut himself from a gull's wing. The ink was never allowed to run dry. Every evening he topped it up from the big bottle, and every evening he said the same thing to the pot, which I was too young to think strange: hold on a little longer.

One Thursday a deckhand called Tobias Crane sat down with his cap in his lap and asked for a letter to Mercy. He gave the weather, the price of biscuit, the mate who snored. Then he stopped. My grandfather waited. Tobias said, very low, that there was one word he did not know how to put on paper, because it was too big for the page. So my grandfather dipped the quill, drew the long looping hand he was known for, and wrote it at the foot of the sheet: Love. Tobias stared at it a good while and said that would do.

The letter went out on the morning tide. Mercy's answer came back on the next boat, folded small, with one line in pencil: tell the man who wrote the last word that I have kept the page. My grandfather pinned it above his desk and never once explained it to anyone. When he died the pot came to me, and I have never filled it with anything but ink. Hold on a little longer, I still say, and I am not ashamed to say it aloud in front of you lot.