Close-up of a fine line lettering tattoo on the side of the ribs reading Listen with your heart, framed by red swirls and small blue and green leaves.

Listen with your heart quote on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the words Listen with your heart in black script across the ribs, set within a looping red swirl. Small leaves in blue, green and dark tones are scattered along the curves. The linework is fine and the colour is applied in soft, lightly shaded areas against the skin, with the design running horizontally across the side of the torso.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Quote Script Heart Swirl Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell buoy off Penhallow had been ringing wrong since the February gales, and Mara Quill took it as a personal insult. Her grandfather would have gone out in the punt with a spanner and a flask. She had a borrowed rowing boat, a torch that flickered, and a head full of his sayings, the one she kept coming back to being the one he chalked above the net loft door: listen with your heart. She thought it was nonsense for fishermen. Fishermen listened for engines and for wind backing into the south.

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She found the buoy by ear anyway, half a mile past the breakwater, where the swell lifted and dropped the iron cage with a sound like a dropped tray. The clapper had snagged on a loop of old net. She leaned over the gunwale, cold to the elbows, feeling for the knot the way her hands had learned to feel for things in the dark, and it was not her eyes that found the place but a kind of pulse in her chest that tugged left, then right, then steady. The bell rang true once she cut it free.

Walking back up the slipway at dawn, she passed the chalk board. Someone had written under the old saying in a different hand: and the sea will tell you the rest. Mara laughed, out loud, alone on the stones, and decided she would leave it there for the next person who needed it.