Matching cross and heartbeat forearm tattoos

She pressed two fingers under the miller's son, Tobias, and then under Ruth, and the barn went quiet, because his beat ran quick as a hare in a hedge and hers was slow as a clock in an empty house. Mab shook her head and said they would have to walk the line together until the two came into step. Tobias laughed and said he had never walked anywhere slowly in his life. Ruth only looked at the floor.

So they walked. Every evening that spring Tobias came down from the upper fields and Ruth came up from the dairy, and they met at the stile above the mill race and counted together by the last of the light, her hand flat on his arm. In June the river rose and the weir groaned, and Tobias went out with the lantern to shut the sluice. He came back soaked, his heart hammering, and Ruth counted it down with her palm until it slowed to match her own. Mab, watching from her step, said nothing, but she sent for the soot and the needle.

They inked the line that autumn, a cross where the beat began, a heartbeat running across the forearm, and a small heart at the end of it. When the mill wheel turned in the spring floods, the old women said, you could hear the two of them counting under the water.