Black ink heart, three nails, an outlined triangle and scattered lettering across a shoulder and upper arm.

Heart, nails and lettering on upper arm

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a shoulder and upper arm wearing a dark sleeveless top, with several black tattoos spread across the skin. The motifs include a solid black heart, three upright nails, an outlined triangle, and irregular lettering and script, with some shading and scratchy marks on the lower arm. The image is entirely black ink on skin against a pale grey tiled wall, with no colour.

Shoulder Upper arm Heart Nail Triangle Lettering Script Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tully kept the boarding house at the top of Gannet Steps and kept her debts in a biscuit tin by the scullery door. Every quarter she tipped them onto the kitchen table and counted them with a wet thumb, and every quarter the total came to one short of what the sea had taken from her husband.

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The lodger in the attic had no money, only a paper bag of nails and a heart he had cut from a lump of coal. He offered to pay in work. She said a coal heart would not stop the slates lifting, and he said the heart was not for the slates. That night he drove three nails into the back stair rail, stood a triangle of sea-glass on the sill, and wrote something on the wall in a hand she could not read.

By morning the wind that had worried the windows for a fortnight had dropped flat. Gulls walked the yard like clerks. Mrs Tully found the tin full to the lid, and no lodger, only the sea-glass standing upright on the sill and the coal heart gone warm in her palm, as if someone had been holding it all night.

She never learned what the letters said, and she never let the wall be painted. Nobody on Gannet Steps has been short of rent since, though they still say the nails must be left where they are.