Black and grey tattoo of a lace-style heart with a rose and leaves, with the script Remember you are loved beneath it, on the upper back.

Lace heart with rose and script on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A heart outline is drawn with a lace pattern, with a rose and leaves with vines inside it. Handwritten script below the heart reads Remember you are loved, with a shorter line of text partly visible beneath. The work is black and grey, with fine outlines and shading in the petals and leaves, set on smooth skin.

Botanical Back Heart Lace Rose Leaves Vine Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace was supposed to be finished before the thaw, so Agnes Rowe carried her pillow and bobbins up the hill to the castle at Caddow, where the last lord had left his cold hall to the jackdaws and asked for a veil fine enough to see the stars through. Nobody in the valley would take the commission. They said the castle had eaten two weavers already. Agnes was sixteen and had nothing left to be frightened of except her mother's cough.

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She worked in the window embrasure with the wind pulling at her hair. Her mother had taught her the old pattern: first the heart, pinned out on the cushion, then a border scalloped like the edge of a dropped doily, then a rose folded in the middle with leaves that came off the stems like small pinched thumbs. Every evening she stitched a few words into the hem in red thread, the way her mother used to write on the back of Agnes's slate: Remember you are loved. There was room under the heart for something longer, so she left a space and told herself she would decide later.

The thaw came and the lord did not. On the last morning the veil was complete and she could not bring herself to carry it back down, so she hung it across the broken arch where the sun would strike it. By noon the wind had got into the weave and the whole thing lifted and breathed, and light fell through the rose in a dapple across the flagstones. A shepherd coming over the ridge saw the shadow of a heart move on the grass and stopped to look.

Agnes walked down that evening with an empty pillow under her arm. The shepherd's wife, who could read, told the valley that the words along the hem were in a girl's hand, and that the space beneath the heart was still blank. Agnes never filled it. She said some things were better left for whoever came up next.