Close-up of two hands with red K and Q letter tattoos, each paired with a heart, on the fingers and hand, with a dark tattoo partly visible on the wrist.

K and Q heart tattoos on fingers

Lettering · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are held together, showing red outlined letters K and Q, each beside a solid red heart, in the style of playing card symbols. The lettering and hearts are filled with a single flat red ink, with clean, even linework. The background is a dark woven surface, and a dark blue-black tattoo is partly visible on the wrist of one arm.

Lettering Hand King Queen Heart Playing card Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the deck in the potting shed, under a tray of seed packets gone soft at the corners and held shut with a perished elastic band. Your grandmother played patience with these cards every evening at the kitchen table, and the first two you draw out are the King and Queen of Hearts, sitting face to face as if they have fallen out over the last trick. Outside, the roses have gone blowsy and pink, and the hedge Tom planted the year before he left has swallowed the side gate whole.

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You carry the cards down the garden to the bench by the sundial, the place the two of you always settled arguments, and lay them out on the warm slats. Patience comes easily. The Queen is nearly finished when you notice a pencilled line on the back of her card, a row of initials and a small arrow pointing at the rose bed against the wall. Someone has tucked a petal under the card, dried flat and brown at the edges, pressed there so long it has left a ghost of itself on the red ink.

You kneel in the border with a trowel and the sun on your neck, and at eight inches the blade knocks against tin. Inside is a folded note in Tom's rounded hand: Two hearts I owe you. Everything else is yours to dig up. You read it twice, then set it aside and put the King and Queen in the hole, faces up, pressed into the damp earth. You fill it in, water the bed, and leave the side gate open so the hedge can do as it likes.