Black and grey tattoo of four hearts filled with fingerprint-like ridges, decreasing in size from top to bottom, on a section of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four fingerprint hearts in a column

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Four hearts are stacked vertically, each filled with fine, concentric ridges that resemble fingerprint whorls. The hearts decrease in size from top to bottom, and the linework is crisp with soft grey shading at the edges. The tattoo is set against plain, lightly textured skin with no other elements in the frame.

Other Heart Fingerprint

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan, the post office in Penzance has finally stopped selling us stamps with the Queen on them, so you'll have to make do with this one, which is a lighthouse and makes the envelope look like a holiday. The ship is good. The galley cook burns the porridge every Tuesday and we all pretend not to notice. I have been practising my knots on the rail and Mr Pascoe says my bowline is now only slightly embarrassing.

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The thing I wanted to tell you is about the inks. At Madeira the bosun took us ashore, and there was a man in a tin shed off the harbour road who did hearts for sailors. I asked for four, one for each of us, and he wanted to know whose fingers. I gave him mine and then made Dad's thumb print the top one, the way you showed me on the back of the seed packet, pressing slowly so the whorls came out. He drew round them and filled the spaces in with a needle no thicker than a hair, ring after ring, and he kept breaking off to rub his eyes.

So the four of us are on paper now, with the biggest at the top and the smallest, which is mine, at the bottom where the ink is still a bit angry. I looked at it this morning in the mirror over the basin and felt Dad's thumb going down with mine, like a sum that comes out even. Tell Mum the smallest heart is the one that was hardest to get right, and she should not worry about it.

Write back to the Azores address. I will be counting the days like a deckhand counts the bells.

All my love, Jack