Line drawing of an ornate heart design with feathers, swirls and small roses in teal, green and red watercolour tones on a white background.

Heart and feather doodle design

Mixed · Flash

A vertical drawing of a large heart at the centre, surrounded by feather shapes, spirals, scalloped dots and small flowers. The heart and feathers are filled with teal and green watercolour washes, while the detailed doodled linework is in black ink. Small red roses, a butterfly and tiny hearts are scattered along the lower stem on a plain white background.

Heart Feather Swirl Rose Butterfly Flower Paisley Doodle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of January the hens have stopped laying, and you are the one who walks the frozen yard at six with a bucket and a torch, counting empty straw. Frost lies on the water trough like a skin. Your uncle Tom would have cursed the cold and then made tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, but Tom is in the front bedroom now, and the tea is your job.

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On Tuesday the feed merchant's invoices arrive in a bundle, and you find the autumn one with its back to the wall. Someone has filled the margin with ink: spirals curling like fern heads, rows of scalloped dots, a heart no bigger than a thumbnail, and feathers that split into stripes. Ruth, who did the books before she left for Carlisle, never signed her work, but you know her hand. The teal wash on the heart is the colour the pond goes just before it freezes over.

You take the sheet to the kitchen table and copy the drawing onto the back of the calendar, badly, one spiral at a time. By noon your fingers are blue and the range has gone cold. Tom calls from the bedroom to ask who's in the kitchen, and you tell him it's only you, doing the books.

That afternoon the hens lay two eggs, brown and warm as hands, and you carry them in cupped against your coat. You pin the invoice above the range where the steam can reach it, and the inked feathers lift a little at their corners, as if the heat means to carry them off somewhere green.