Two close photos of a forearm tattoo showing the heart curve equation, a black coordinate graph and a red heart outline, with a green leaf at the top, in a geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart curve equation and graph on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the equation x² + (y − ∛x²)² = 1 above a black coordinate graph with labelled axes and tick marks, with a red heart curve drawn across the axes. A green and red leaf sits at the top edge of the frame, and the date 11/02/2013 is printed beside the graph. Black linework is combined with red and green ink, and the two panels show the same forearm from slightly different angles.

Geometric Forearm Heart Leaf Date

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The napkin had already gone soft at one corner when Alan Feeney asked Maud to keep it flat. Vinegar, the strip light buzzing over the counter, a chip shop in Leeds on the eleventh of February with the rain coming sideways off the car park. He had taught Year Nine for thirty-one years and still could not say anything plainly, so he drew instead. Two lines crossed at the middle, a row of tick marks up each one, and the biro he had chewed flat on the bus.

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He wrote the equation above the axes: x squared, plus the quantity y minus the cube root of x squared, the whole thing squared, equal to one. Maud read it twice and said it looked like an argument that had been left on read. He told her the cube root was the brave part, the bit that pulls the bottom of the curve down into a point while the top stays round and reasonable. Then he traced the heart in red sauce pen, the only colour he had, and it came out lopsided on the left, which he said was how you knew a person had done it by hand.

She took the biro off him and added a tick at one and a half, then wrote the date under the graph because she trusted dates more than sentences. He had spent six attempts on the spare room and the flat in Hull and every one had sounded like a letter to the council. This one needed only the axes.

The napkin hangs in their hall now, framed beside the kettle. The cube root is still wrong about the bottom point, and they agree it is the best bit.