Black lettering tattoo on a shoulder blade, with the words 'a dream is a wish your heart makes' arranged in a heart shape in a lettering style.

Heart-shaped quote on the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a heart-shaped tattoo on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with the words 'a dream is a wish your heart makes' written in a continuous line of black script. The thin, even linework follows the curve of the heart, with the words starting at the top left and reading clockwise around the shape. The skin is pale and the composition is cropped tightly around the tattoo, with the heart's centre left as open skin.

Lettering Back Heart Quote Script Dream Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass closed before anyone thought to tell the sheep. I was nineteen and alone at the hut on Carrow Col, the only one who knew the old cairn at the summit had a hollow in its middle, shaped the way a child draws a heart. My grandmother called it the wishing ring. Travellers dropped pebbles into it and said their wants aloud, and she swore the wind carried them down to the valley folk who needed them most.

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The autumn my brother left for the coast, he came up the track at dusk with a stub of pencil and a bag of slate chips. "Write it round the edge," he said, "so the stone keeps it." I told him that was nonsense. He wrote anyway, in small, careful letters that circled the hollow, starting at the top and running down the left side the way meltwater runs. I read it aloud as he went: a dream is a wish your heart makes. He laughed, said it sounded like something off a biscuit tin, and walked into the cloud without his coat.

I did not expect the letters to hold through a winter, but they did. Snow filled the hollow every week and every week I cleared it with my glove, and the words stayed sharp under the frost while the cairn leaned and settled. By spring the hut roof had gone, so I dragged my bed into the lee of the stones to be near them.

In May a postman's boy came over the col with a parcel that smelled of salt. Inside was a tin, inside the tin a pebble, and on the pebble, in pencil and rather cross: I got there. Put something in the middle. I set my own wish down in the hollow. It was small and round and still warm from my hand, and I left the centre open for whatever came next.