Black henna-style design of an outlined heart with curling swirls and dots on the inside of a forearm, resting on a textured towel.

Heart and swirls on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-tone outlined heart sits at the centre of the design, with curling tendril lines extending up and down and two dot-centred rosettes beside it. The linework is bold and slightly uneven, and a row of small dots follows the curve of the heart. The design is dark brown-black on pale skin, photographed straight on against a cream textured towel.

Forearm Heart Swirl Dot Flourish Rosette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the lift is broken again and you have climbed all those floors to hear me, so the least I can do is talk slowly. This is about Ebere Okafor, who lived on the ninth floor of Harrow Point the summer the council painted the stairwells the colour of weak tea.

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Her brother was getting married in the community hall by the bins, and Ebere had promised every cousin a hand painted with henna. She had a tin of paste her aunt posted from Leicester and a wooden cocktail stick she kept in her apron pocket. Her hands were steady, but the afternoon was hot and the stick kept slipping, so the first heart came out leaning like a tired man on a bus stop. The little boys from the fourth floor laughed until one of them fell off the bench.

She did not wipe it away. She sat on the balcony rail with her arm out to the air and tried again, slower, and this time she counted the dots out loud, one for every landing she had passed on the way up, nine in all, curled round the heart like a necklace. Two rosettes for the boys who had stolen the bicycle. Tendrils up and down, because the lift was broken then too.

The wedding came and went. The henna faded in a fortnight, the way it always does, and the heart ghosted into a brown shadow. But the dots stayed longest, pale and stubborn. So if you ever see a heart on an arm that wobbles a little at the edges, don't ask what it means. Ask who counted the stairs.