Two hands pressed together with black script lettering reading Inhale love on one and Exhale hate on the other, placed on the backs of the fingers and hands against a dark background.

Inhale love and exhale hate hand tattoos

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are pressed together with fingertips meeting, and each has a line of handwritten-style black script tattooed across the fingers and back of the hand. The left reads Inhale love and the right reads Exhale hate, with fine, even linework and solid black ink. The plain dark background isolates the hands and the text, and the image is in black and grey tones.

Lettering Hand Word Script Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the chestnuts are nearly done and the bridge lamps are coming on across the river. I'll tell you about the Halloran brothers, who worked the bellows at Pell Street forge when this city still had gaslight in its alleys.

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Their master, old Aurelio Tessaro, kept a rule chalked above the furnace door: a fire eats whatever air you give it. Breathe anger into it and it roars and cracks the crucible. Breathe steady and it sings. The brothers were bad at steady. Dominic would shout across the anvil, Ruan would sulk over his tongs, and the coals went sour between them for weeks at a time.

Then one February night the flue iced over and the metal went dull in the pot. Ruan knelt at the bellows, knuckles split and raw, and Dominic knelt beside him, and neither said a word. They pressed their palms together over the pipe the way they had as boys in the chapel, drew a breath in, slow, and pushed it out through the nozzle together. The fire climbed white. The iron ran clean.

Nobody saw them argue after that, though they never stopped disagreeing about anything else. Ruan swore the ash came down like snow that night, settling on the cobbles and on their two pairs of hands. Dominic said it was only soot. Ask either of them now, and they'll tell you the same thing: the air you let out matters as much as the air you take in.