Two forearms with matching black line-drawn envelope tattoos, each with a soft blue or purple watercolour splash, held together by clasped hands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching envelope tattoos on two forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms show matching envelope outlines drawn in thin black linework, with the flap lines meeting at the centre of each envelope. Each envelope has a loose watercolour splash, blue on the left arm and purple with a touch of yellow on the right, creating a contrast with the crisp outlines. The arms are angled towards each other with the hands clasped in the lower part of the frame, against a paved ground.

Fine line Forearm Envelope Watercolour splash Outline Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The post came up the valley on a Tuesday, and by Thursday the whole of Ferndale Row had stopped pretending not to wait for it. I carried the bag on the crossbar of my bicycle and knew each envelope by its weight before I read a word. Most were bills. Some were not.

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Nia Probert at number nine wrote to her husband on the afternoon shift every single week, and he wrote back from the cage at the bottom of the pit with his fingers black to the second knuckle. Her envelopes came back to her soaked in a blue wash from the paint box her mother had left behind, because she said a letter ought to look like it had been out in weather. His came back in a dusty purple, a shade the shop in Pontypridd had sold him as lilac. He had dipped the corners in it, and once there was a yellow thumbprint at the flap where he had clearly been laughing.

In March the rain flooded the Glyn pit and kept the shift at home for nine days. The letters kept coming anyway, and I kept carrying them up the hill, until one morning the bag held an envelope addressed to me, in her hand, with the blue wash still damp at one corner. Inside was a single line: Tell him the post is late but we are not.

I left the bag on the wall that afternoon and walked down to number nine, where Nia stood at the gate with a blue envelope already in her hand. Down the lane came Dafydd, coal dust on his shirt and grinning, and when he saw me he lifted the purple one like a prize. Neither of them asked me to stay. I went back up the hill with an empty bag, and for once the weight of it was exactly right.