Black line drawing of a flexed arm with a heart-and-arrow tattoo reading MOM on the upper arm, on a plain grey background.

Heart with arrow and MOM on a drawn arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Flash

A black line illustration of a flexed arm shows a heart pierced by an arrow, with the word MOM written inside the heart. The linework is simple and uniform, with no shading, and the design sits on the upper arm just above a rolled sleeve. The palette is limited to black ink on a pale surface against a plain taupe grey background, with the arm placed on the right side of the frame.

Upper arm Heart Arrow Mom Arm Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Tobias had been told the ink in the scriptorium was for psalters and nothing else, so when the abbot's old spaniel came nosing at his sleeve, he tugged the cuff down quickly. Beneath the wool, a heart the size of a walnut still smarted. He had drawn it himself in the back room of a Whitby chip shop, with a needle borrowed from a fisherman who swore by his trade. The arrow ran clean through it, and the two letters inside were the only thing he had asked the man to keep plain.

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His mother had written every Sunday for thirty-one years, always on the back of the parish bulletin, always asking whether he was eating enough. Tobias answered in Latin on good vellum paper, which she could not read, and in English on the scraps the bursar allowed, which she read aloud to the whole street. He had never mentioned the heart. He suspected she would tell the Mother Superior, who was her cousin and had never once kept a secret from the parish.

On the feast of Saint Hilda the abbot came into the scriptorium with a letter in one hand and the look of a man who had already read the postmark. Tobias stood, and the spaniel thumped its tail against the stool. "Your mother asks whether you are wearing the wool vest," the abbot said. "She says you will catch your death."

Tobias took the letter, turned it over, and on the blank back of the bulletin drew a small heart with an arrow through it, the letters inside in his neatest capitals. He handed it back. The abbot read it, grunted, and tucked it into his habit. "Tell her the vest is on," he said. "Under the sleeve."