Two matching black ink tattoos of the ASL I love you hand sign with a heart, placed side by side on forearms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching ASL I love you tattoos on two forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms sit side by side in a close crop, each with a black ink tattoo of the ASL I love you hand sign, drawn with a heart shape below the fingers. The lines are solid and bold with a slightly textured edge, and the marks are similar in size and design. The warm, orange-toned lighting and tight framing keep the focus on the two matching tattoos.

Forearm Heart Matching Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hooter at Hollin Bank could be heard in three villages, but it could not be heard at the face, so the men talked with their hands. Dai Pritchard taught me the first of them when I was nine, sitting on the back step while he polished his lamp glass. His fingers folded over the wick like a card trick. Thumb, first finger and little finger up, the two middle ones tucked down. He said it meant the same above ground as below, and that a sign only needed seeing once to stay with you.

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The fall came in the Lower Seam the spring I turned twelve. It took most of Dai's hearing and left him his hands, and he came home grey to the eyebrows with a bandage over one ear. My mother cried into the kettle while he lifted his palm to her and drew a small heart beneath it in the air. They had been courting since the Coronation. She had never learned a word of it, so she learned that week, badly, with her tongue caught between her teeth.

By the time I started on the screens, the lads in the lamp room were signing before they learned their own names. Dai ran the cage board for thirty years and never missed a shift change, because he could read a banksman's hands across the whole pit yard. The summer I turned seventeen we went together to a back room above the chip shop in Aberdare. He had the heart inked on the inside of his forearm and I had mine on the outside, so that when we stood side by side they matched like a pair of gloves.

On my first morning on the cage, the lamp room went quiet, and Dai's hand came up through the steam from the boiler house. He tapped his heart twice below his wrist, then pointed down the shaft. I lifted mine and tapped back. Then the cage dropped into the dark with both of us watching each other's hands until the light went out.