Red heart outline with a grey shaded ribbon looping through it, a colour tattoo on the inner wrist.

Heart and grey ribbon on the inner wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red heart outline is interwoven with a grey ribbon that loops through its centre, with a small red drop at the lower end of the ribbon. The linework is bold and clean, and the ribbon is shaded in soft greys to suggest depth, while the heart is left as a flat red outline. The tattoo sits centrally on the inner wrist against a plain background of skin and a grey fabric seat.

Forearm Heart Ribbon Awareness ribbon Drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frank Ogunleye had been mopping the ninth-floor landing of Carrick House for twenty minutes when he noticed the wire. It hung from the handrail of the stairwell, a grey flex no thicker than a bootlace, looped twice through a heart somebody had painted on the breezeblock in red emulsion. The heart was only an outline, the paint thin where the brush had hesitated, and the grey cable wove through it as if the two had agreed to share the space.

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He knew the cable. It came from the lift motor room on the roof, where the engineers had been sending complaints up the chain for a month. Nobody had told him who had tied it there. Lift four had been out since March, and the residents on nine had got used to carrying shopping up eight flights with their hips complaining. Frank untied the knot once and then, without deciding to, tied it back, pulling it snug against the paint so the ribbon sat square in the middle.

Upstairs, Mrs Pennock opened her door a crack and asked whether he'd seen the boy from fourteen. Frank said he hadn't. She said the boy had been using the stairs to get down to his mother's, one flight at a time, carrying a bag of tins in each hand, and that somebody should do something. Frank said he'd put it on the list. She looked at the wire and nodded, as if that settled it.

That evening he took a tin of red paint from the cupboard under the bins and went back up. He added a single drop beneath the loop, where the cable ended, the way a man might initial a repair docket. In the morning the wire was still there, and so was the drop, and when lift four finally groaned into motion, nobody on nine mentioned it.