Colour tattoo on the inner forearm of a heart, a red, yellow and green spiral, and the script words you can't take the sky from me.

Heart, spiral and lyric on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red heart with a grey outline sits above a multicoloured spiral of red, yellow and green, with dark radiating lines crossing its rings. Curved black script runs along the forearm beside the spiral and above the heart, reading you can't take the sky from me. The linework is clean and the colour fills are solid, with the spiral and heart set against the skin of the inner arm.

Lettering Forearm Heart Spiral Script Quote Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on the landing, the lot of you, and mind the lino by the bins, it's sticky there still. Thirteenth floor of Ashgrove House, and the lift has been broken since the Jubilee, which was the last time anyone round here bothered to fix a thing. Now, Mrs Pike had the flat at the end, the one with the blue door, and she had a tin of red biscuits on her sideboard that she never once opened. Inside that tin was a heart cut from a sheet of old roofing, painted by her husband Frank, who could never sit still long enough to finish anything except that.

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The council man came up one Tuesday with a clipboard and a face like wet cardboard. The roof was to be fenced, he said, for the aerial people, and the flats below would have to make do with the view from their own windows. Mrs Pike took him up the stairs one step at a time, because her knees were not what they had been, and she showed him the washing line on the roof. Frank had painted the drying wheel in red and yellow and green, every spoke of it, so that on a windy day it turned like a sweet in a shop window and the whole estate looked up to see it spin.

The council man looked at the spokes and then at the grey sky over the car park. Mrs Pike shook out a tea towel and pegged it to the nearest rung. You can have the lift, she said, and the stairs, and the fence if you can get it up here. But you can't take the sky from me.

That evening the children on the estate counted the lines on the roof wheel from the ground, and every one of them, to this day, swears the spiral was still turning when the lights went off.