A small red outlined heart with a black cross overlapping it, tattooed on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and cross on the inner wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a red outlined heart with a black cross laid over its centre, set on the inner wrist. The linework is loose and slightly uneven, with bold strokes rather than fine detail. The red and black stand out clearly against the pale skin, and the design sits centrally in a plain, close-up frame.

Forearm Heart Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Crane kept his barge, the Constance, tied below the third lock at Stanningley, and every spring he went over her hull with a pot of tar and a brush. Nobody on the cut could remember him painting anything else. Then one March a boy called Eli Varley, who worked the lock gates for a shilling a day, found him sitting on the towpath with a red heart drawn in chalk on the cabin doors and a black cross laid over its middle. The chalk was already smudged where his thumb had rubbed it.

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"That's for my sister's girl," Tobias said, before Eli could ask. "Mary. The river had her the winter the mill bridge went."

Eli waited. Water slapped at the lock walls and a heron stood on the far gate like a bent nail. Tobias pulled his cap down and talked about the flood, and about how he had walked the bank for three days calling her name, and how the men from the works had stopped looking on the fourth. He said a heart with no cross was only a bit of red, and a cross with no heart was only wood a man has to carry.

Eli went home for his supper and thought no more about it until the next morning, when the lock keeper's boy came running to say the Constance had gone. There was no barge at the third lock and no sign of Tobias on the towpath. The chalk was gone from the doors too, but when Eli walked down to the lock beam he found a small heart and cross cut into the oak, the lines uneven, as if made by a hand that had not held a knife for years. He opened the gates for the first boat of the season without asking anyone for the toll.