Traditional tattoo of a pink heart-shaped bottle with a dark bulb atomiser, red flowers and teal leaves on skin.

Heart-shaped bottle with flowers

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A heart-shaped pink bottle with a dark grey squeeze bulb sits at the centre, with crossed black lines across its upper body and grey shading along its lower edge. Two red flowers with yellow centres and dark green leaves frame the bottle, with teal leaves adding colour at the top and bottom. Bold black outlines and solid fills give the design a classic flash look, shown against plain skin with another tattoo partly visible at the right edge.

Traditional Other Heart Bottle Flower Leaves Lattice

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abernethy never let anyone touch the heart-shaped bottle in the window, so when the Saturday crowd came up off the pier with sunburn and sixpences, Ruth had to stand on the stool to reach it. The glass was warm from the lamp. She pressed the squeeze bulb once, twice, and a cloud of rose and wet pennies drifted over the counter, the same smell her mother used to bring home from the market in Scarborough.

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'Not that one,' he called from the back room, without looking up from his ledger. 'That one isn't for sale.' Ruth set it back behind the wire lattice he had fixed over the window years ago to keep the sun off the stock. The pink had faded on the side that faced the glass, leaving a paler patch like a thumbprint on a mirror.

The turn came at closing. Ruth found him sitting on a crate in the back, spectacles pushed up, holding a letter with a Hull postmark. 'My sister's,' he said. 'She wants the bottle sent over. Our father bought it for our mother the summer before the war, and it has stood in that window ever since because neither of us would be the one to finish the last of it.' Ruth looked at the bulb, dark grey and dry as an old fig, and understood that nobody had squeezed it in a very long time.

On Monday she wrapped it in brown paper and a page of the Gazette and carried it to the bus stop herself. Through the paper the heart still showed a little pink at the edges, and she thought that somewhere under the wrapping the rose was still there, waiting for one more pressing before the lid came off for good.