Black and grey tattoo of a heart-shaped skateboard deck with trucks and wheels, with the script words Love affair, on the upper arm.

Heart-shaped skateboard with Love affair script

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A heart-shaped skateboard deck with two visible wheels and metal trucks sits across the centre of the design, with the script words Love affair written across the upper half. The shading is soft grey with fine outlines, giving the wood grain and metal parts some depth. The design fills the frame on a pale skin surface with a decorative black and white border around the photo.

Upper arm Heart Wheel Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boatbuilder's daughter on Carrick Holm had no use for a plank that would not bend, so when the Maren Ada broke her back on the skerries, she took the oak deck and carved it into a heart with her father's gouge. Her name was Isla Crane and she was twelve, and the island said she was touched in the head, because nobody on Carrick Holm had ever owned a wheel.

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She bolted two iron trucks from the Maren's old steering quadrant to the underside and fitted four wheels cut from a cart's rim. Then she rolled it down the lane to the chapel steps, where the gulls gathered like gossips. The minister's nephew, a long lad called Tobias Wray who had been sent out from the mainland with a bad chest, watched her push off and fall. He laughed, and then he stopped laughing, because she got up and went again.

Through the summer they raced the board along the single road, she riding and he running ahead with a rope tied to the tail. The islanders painted the words LOVE AFFAIR across the upper curve in tar, because Tobias said that was what the mainland papers called anything that happened too fast. Nobody knew whether the affair was with the board or with each other, and neither of them ever said.

When the ferry came for him in September, the board stayed on the chapel steps with its wheels turned to the sea. Isla kept it there for forty years, and each spring a new child rode it down to the harbour and back, which is how the island learned that a heart can be carried a long way on something that rolls.