A child's hand peels a paper sheet of four red heart temporary tattoos onto the inside of their forearm.

Heart temporary tattoos on a child's forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A child's hand holds a translucent backing sheet with four dark red heart designs, pressing one heart onto the forearm. The hearts are simple solid shapes with a slightly mottled texture, and the arm is in sharp focus against a soft-focus pink patterned background. The composition places the transfer diagonally across the frame, with the hand at the top left.

Forearm Heart Temporary tattoo Child Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ansell kept the transfers in a biscuit tin under the till, between the sherbet lemons and a receipt book nobody had balanced since spring. Four hearts to a sheet, the colour of cough syrup gone dark in the bottle. She had charged tuppence for them when she started, and now she apologised for the price, though nobody paid it any more. Children came in for a lolly and left with a sheet folded into a pocket, and she let them.

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Desmond came in on a wet Thursday with a fistful of coppers and asked which heart was the best. She told him the top one, always, because it had the most ink in it. He stood at the sink in the back room while she ran the tap over a flannel, showed him how to dampen the paper until the backing went soft and slid, then he pressed it to the inside of his wrist and counted under his breath to thirty, the way his mother had told him to in the car.

When he peeled the paper away, the heart had come off crooked and smeared at one edge, like a thumbprint on a window. His lip started to go. Mrs Ansell took the sheet from him, held it up to the grey light from the harbour, and said the crooked ones were the ones that meant it. He went out with the sheet in his fist and the flannel still wet on the counter. Later she found the paper he had left behind, one heart still whole in the corner, and she pinned it to the shop window where the sun came through the red ink and threw a small dark shape on the floor.