Traditional style flash drawing of a pale hand with pink fingertips, wrapped in three yellow banners reading COLD HANDS, COLDER and HEART, with dripping red and white details at the wrist.

Hand with COLD HANDS, COLDER, HEART banners

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A pale hand reaches upward with its fingers slightly curled, and three yellow ribbon banners wind around it and the fingers. The banners carry the words COLD HANDS, COLDER and HEART in black capitals, and the drawing ends in dripping, torn edges with small red details. Bold black outlines are paired with soft watercolour washes in peach, pink, red and yellow, set on a textured off-white background.

Traditional Hand Banner Ribbon Blood Drip Finger Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite,

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You'll laugh, but the night you left I finally understood what Mum meant by cold hands, colder heart. It was the thing she said whenever I came in from the yard with my fingers white. Last Tuesday at the Dover booth, a lorry driver passed his papers through the slot, and his fingers were blue at the nails and steady as a surgeon's. He didn't flinch when I asked him to step out. I thought, there's a man who has been carrying something cold for a long time.

It turned out to be a wedding ring he'd been holding for a woman in Calais, and a shoebox of water-spoiled photographs he wanted to drop in the bin himself. Nothing I could stamp. I let him through with the ring in his fist and wrote nothing on the form except the time.

Then the rain came sideways off the Channel and the stamp pad dried out. I sat with my hands tucked under my arms like a schoolgirl. Somebody had left a roll of yellow tape on the desk, and I tore off three strips without thinking and pressed them flat along the edge of the counter, the way you'd keep a page from curling. On the first one I wrote HEART in capitals, then sat looking at it until the ink dried.

Maybe that's the only sort of stamp I've got left. I'll see you at Easter. Bring the good kettle.

Love, Ines