Hand holding a heart card with Love Kills
Black and grey · Flash
A bold black outline drawing of a hand emerging from a cuff that reads LOVE KILLS in capital letters. The hand holds up a tilted card with a heart pierced by an arrow. The design uses clean, even linework with no shading or colour, and the subject sits centrally on a plain white background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Eddie Marsh never dealt from the bottom of the pack. He had no need. The men who climbed the stairs above the Bevington Lane chip shop came with wages burning holes in their pockets and wives at home who had already stopped asking, and they lost it to him on the cards alone, the way rain finds the low ground.
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His calling card was a queen of hearts with an arrow through her chest, painted by a sign writer in Anfield for a shilling a dozen. He tilted it when he laid it down, the way a waiter presents a bill. "Love kills," he'd say, tapping the cuff of his shirt where his mother had stitched the words in red thread. "So don't go getting sentimental about your pay packet." The men laughed. Then they stopped laughing and paid.
The night Danny Quirke came up with his brother's savings in a Woodbine tin, Eddie watched him play three hands with the grey look of a man already drowning. Danny lost the lot on a pair of sevens. Afterwards he sat on the landing with his cap in his fists, and Eddie, who had not felt the weight of anything in twenty years, found he had to go and sit beside him.
He pressed the tin money back into Danny's coat from his own wallet and didn't say why. In the morning the stairs were swept, and in the bin lay the queen, torn clean across the heart, the arrow still running through her.
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