Traditional style colour tattoo of a red heart inside a teal and gold framed box, with a pink flower and teal leaves, on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and flower on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A red heart sits inside a dimensional box or frame with a gold dotted band, shaded in light blue and black. A pink flower with an orange centre and teal leaves fill the lower right, with black scrollwork and dotted accents framing the design. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills are typical of the traditional style, and the design covers the back of the hand.

Traditional Hand Heart Flower Leaves Scrollwork Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at me like that. I've told this to fewer men than have sailed past Pendeen, and most of them were drunk. Summer of '08, the Mary Ellen out of Newlyn, and Tobias Crane kept a tin box under his bunk with a gold band round it, dotted like a biscuit tin. Nobody was allowed to open it. He said it held letters from a girl in Lerwick, though he'd had no reply to any of them, and he'd handled the envelopes so often the corners had gone soft as bread.

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Halfway across the Minch the weather came in off the west like a dropped anvil. We lost the foresail and the cook's stove, and Tobias went over the rail after a loose spar with a line round his wrist. I went in after him. When we hauled him back he was blue and cursing, and the first thing he did was feel for that box. It had gone down the scuppers into the bilge, and he crawled after it through the sick water on his knees.

When we tied up at Stornoway, a harbour clerk was waiting on the quay with a clipboard and a face like a wet Sunday. He had the same tin box under his arm. Tobias stared, the clerk stared back, and then they both laughed until they had to sit on the bollards. The girl in Lerwick had sent the same letter to each of them, with a pink flower pressed flat inside, and neither had ever thought to ask the other.

Tobias gave me the box when he came off the boats for good. I still have it. I've never opened it either, and I don't intend to. The water took the gold off the band, but the heart on the lid is still red.