Traditional colour tattoo on a thigh showing a banner reading HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, with a red and yellow sunburst, a heart and mountains with pine trees.

Home is where the heart is banner on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A banner across the centre reads HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS in black capitals on a light ground, placed over a red and yellow sunburst. Below the sunburst sit a small heart and a dark mountain silhouette with pine trees, all outlined in bold black linework. The tattoo is shown in a close, slightly warm-toned photo on a thigh, with denim shorts visible at the top edge.

Traditional Thigh Banner Sunburst Heart Mountain Pine tree Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign above the hydroponics hatch still says HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, though the letters have faded to the colour of weak tea and the sunburst behind them has gone the rust of old pipework. You have walked under it every shift for eleven years without reading it properly. Today the work order is blunt: the bulkhead panel is being stripped for a new seal, and someone has to sign off on what gets saved from the old wall. Marta, the archivist, is waiting for you with a scanner and a cup of tea that tastes of recycled bark.

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"The mountain's the part they argued about," she says, tilting the lens over the dark silhouette with its clumped pines. "The first crew had a photograph of one, printed on paper, passed hand to hand until the corners went soft. Nobody on the ring had ever stood on ground that high. They painted it anyway, and the pines are wrong, too round, like children draw them." She laughs, and then doesn't. "Half of them were dead before the second generation was born."

You look for the heart, which is smaller than you remember, tucked under the lowest curve of the sunburst. Whoever painted it had drawn it carefully, then left it almost lost in the black outline, as if they had wanted it found only by people who were looking. You think of the corridor cameras, the ration queue, the hatch that opens onto the cold hold where the old seed stock is kept.

You tell Marta to cut the panel out whole and bring it down to the lower deck, where the children sleep under the grow-lights. You will hang it there, above the bunks, where the paint can catch the lamps at the start of each night cycle. When the lights go amber and the ring goes quiet, the sunburst will glow the way it was meant to, and the small red heart will be the last thing anyone sees before they close their eyes.