Pencil sketch of an outlined heart with two intertwined swirling lines ending in curls, a fine line tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Heart with twisting swirls sketch

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an outlined heart at the top, with two thin lines that spiral down from its point and cross over each other. The lines finish in small curls at several points along the lower half. The shading is light grey on a white background, and the linework is delicate and mostly uniform.

Fine line Heart Swirl Curl Vine Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the 6.40 is late again and it won't come before the kettle boils. Now, I'll tell you about the crossing at Harrow Bank, where two lines come down off the moor and bend round each other like dancers who've forgotten the steps.

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Every winter a porter called Ada Pell walked the down platform with a hand lamp, checking the points. She had a habit of counting the iron curls on the canopy brackets, nine of them, each ending in a little spiral like the top of a fern. Her father had forged them at a smithy in Keighley, and he said the curls were there so the rain would have somewhere to go besides the passengers' collars.

One January the signal wires iced solid and the Thursday express ran through on the wrong line. Ada was the only soul on the platform. She swung her lamp across the crossing, back and forth, until the driver saw the light and pulled up with his wheels grinding and the steam rolling over the roof like a grey ribbon.

Nobody wrote it up as a heroic act. The inspector called it luck. But when the thaw came she walked down to the bend and found a tin box wedged under the sleepers, with a letter in it from a woman whose signalman had died on that same curve in 1889. She had asked only that someone keep a lamp lit there. Ada did, for forty-one years, and the curls are still up on the brackets if you care to look.