Black ink heart tattoo with a small cross above it, placed behind the ear in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and cross tattoo behind the ear

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of an ear with a small tattoo sitting behind it on the skin. The tattoo shows a bold outlined heart with a cross on top and a pointed shape at its base, with a faint second line trailing below. The soft lighting and dark hair in the background keep the focus on the tattoo and the ear, which has a piercing at the top.

Other Heart Cross Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman at Ashmere kept his fare in a clay pot under the bench, and every spring the river took a little more of the bank. His daughter Teshe wanted the family gone before the water reached the doorposts. She asked him for the one thing worth carrying, the bronze seal his grandfather had cut: a heart with a short cross standing on its top, and a hooked point below where a cord could be threaded through.

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Her father shook his head. The seal was for marking the ferry tokens, he said, and a mark pressed into wet clay could be carried to any shore and still be honoured. So Teshe took the seal, a lump of clay wrapped in linen, and a loaf of barley bread, and walked south along the salt road. At every well she stopped she pressed the seal into a scrap of clay and gave it to a child, telling each one to keep it until somebody asked what it meant.

By the fourth month the cord had worn through and the seal was gone. She searched the salt flats on her knees until a stranger laughed and said the mark was only a heart with a little axe on it. Teshe did not argue. She sat down on the white ground and ate the last of the bread, and when she looked up a boy from the flats was standing there holding the seal out to her, having found it in the mud where she had dropped it while stopping to drink.

Years later, ferry tokens stamped with a heart and a cross turned up at a dozen wells along the salt road. Nobody could say who had started it. The river kept taking its bank, but the ferryman's grandchildren never once took a fare that had not been marked first.