Black ornamental tattoo of a open heart with flowing swirls on the top of a foot, with rolled denim jeans above and black painted toenails.

Heart and swirl tattoo on the top of a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on a brown cushioned surface, with a rolled-up denim cuff above the ankle. A black outlined heart with scrolling swirls and tendrils sits on the top of the foot, drawn in smooth, even linework with solid black ink. The image is in colour, with the tattoo as the clear focal point against the skin and dark background.

Other Heart Swirl Scrollwork Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night porter's trolley squeaks on the third floor corridor at two, and I know every wheel of it. Nobody else on the ward has the patience for the gate at the end of Ward Nine, the old iron one the builders kept when they gutted the rest of the place. My grandfather forged its scrolls in a yard in Halifax before the war, and the heart at the centre is his, the only bit he ever signed.

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Mrs Agnes Dunmore, who ran the linen store for thirty years, told me that. She kept a biscuit tin of his drawings, sheets of tracing paper gone the colour of weak tea. On Tuesdays she poured me tea from her flask and let me turn the pages with the tips of my fingers. Last month she stopped coming in. The day sister said her flat was empty and the tin had gone to a nephew in Bradford, and that was that.

Tonight I found a sheet tucked behind the lost property ledger, forgotten under the rubber stamp. It was the same heart, but the swirls ran outward into tendrils that curled like the ends of a violin, and in the corner, in pencil, Agnes had written: for the one who mends things. I stood there with the trolley ticking as the boiler kicked in.

At half five I took the sheet down to the gate and held it against the iron in the grey light. The scrolls matched, every turn, and I understood she had not been leaving me a message so much as a set of instructions. I took the pencil from behind my ear and began tracing the outline on the frosted glass of the window, one curl after another, until the ward woke up and somebody asked me what I thought I was doing.