Hand sign tattoo with a red heart

Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised hand sign drawn as four thick black vertical strokes, with a black heart outline below it and a small black stroke to the right. The heart is filled with red, and the rest of the design is solid black with smooth, even edges. The photo is a tight, straight-on close-up against plain skin, with the design centred in the frame.

Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had been coming to the Palais since April, and in all that time nobody had asked her to dance without first shouting their name over the brass. So when the young man by the cloakroom stood with his hands in his pockets for an hour, watching the floor the way a man watches the sea, she assumed he was waiting for someone who wasn't coming. Stanley, who took the coats and knew everyone's business, leant over the counter and told her his name was Teddy, that he had been deaf since a fever at six, and that he was waiting for nobody.

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Maud had learnt a handful of words in finger-talk from her aunt, who ran a wool shop on the front and liked to swear in it. She tried them on him anyway. She crossed the sprung floor between the couples, the band doing something swung and frantic with a clarinet, and when she reached him she lifted her hand and held it there: thumb out, little finger out, the two middle fingers folded down like a secret. Then she tapped her chest with the same hand and pointed at him.

He looked at her hand for a long time. Then he laughed, a loud, unmusical laugh she could feel through the floorboards, and he made the sign back to her with his whole arm, slow and certain, the way you'd write a name on a card you meant to keep.

They danced the last waltz without a single word between them. When the band stopped, Stanley came out from behind the coat rail with two hats, one for each of them, and found them still standing in the middle of the floor, the drummer's cymbal shivering somewhere above their heads.