Traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing a heart frame with a black and grey mountain scene, red roses, a hand in a blue cuff and the words love and will tear us apart.

Heart frame with roses and lettering on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A heart-shaped frame with a gold outline holds a black and grey engraved mountain landscape, with a hand in a blue cuff reaching up to hold its lower edge. Two red roses with green leaves sit at the sides of the heart, and script reading love runs down the left, with the phrase will tear us apart in block typewriter lettering below. The bold outlines and flat, saturated fills of red, gold, blue and green are typical of traditional work, set against the black and grey shading of the landscape.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Heart Rose Mountain Hand Script Lettering Love Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The photograph had lived behind the barometer in the wheelhouse since March, out of reach of the spray. Dougie Ross took it down whenever the Maggie Kerr dropped into a trough, as if he needed to check it was still there. Nell had drawn the mountain herself on the back of a tide table and cut the frame from a biscuit tin lid, its gold rim crimped by her thumbnail. In the picture her hand held the bottom edge steady, the way she held everything she meant to keep.

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The fleet had split off Cape Wrath at dawn, six boats heading south for the herring and two pushing west for the deep grounds, the Maggie Kerr among them. Calum Baird on the radio said the glass was falling and nobody should be a hero. Dougie had no ambition to be one. He had a wife on the quay at Ullapool and a chalk board outside the net loft that she wiped and rewrote each morning. When the swell came up grey and hard, he watched the horizon for the ridge line he had traced so often that he could feel it under his fingertips.

At noon the cloud tore open for ten minutes and there it was, a jag of dark rock with snow lying in its gullies, exactly where the drawing had put it. He steered until the peak sat square in the window and held his course by it through the afternoon, while the rain came and went and the nets hauled up silver. That night he set the frame on the chart table where the lamp could reach it, its corner soft with salt.

They came in on the Tuesday with the holds full. Nell was waiting on the pier with one hand raised against the wind. He stepped off the gangway and held the photograph up to her, the glass cracked straight across the summit. She looked from it to the real hills stacked grey behind the town and laughed. "You kept it dry," she said, and took his wrist in her cold hand, and did not let go until the boat was tied.