Two small matching black fine line heart outline tattoos, one on a finger and one on the back of a hand, in a sepia photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching heart symbol tattoos on two hands

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two small matching tattoos show a heart outline drawn in the shape of the "<3" text symbol, each turned on its side. The linework is thin, dark and solid, with no shading. The sepia-toned photograph shows the two hands close together, with one tattoo on a finger and the other on the hand beside it.

Fine line Hand Heart Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign was for Hollis and Daughter, chandlers, and Ada had got as far as the second letter of CHANDLERY when the fine brush gave out. Her brother Tom held the ladder and complained about the wind coming off the harbour wall, which was his way of saying he would rather be in the Anchor with a pint than in the cold with a pot of lead white.

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Under the lintel, where the old board had rotted through, she had pencilled a small mark before she climbed up. It was a chevron opening to the left, with two humps at its back, the same sign they used to pass each other across the schoolyard when they were too young to write notes. Tom said it looked like a fish that had swallowed a hook. Ada said it was a heart lying down because it had grown tired of standing up.

He shipped out on the Gudrun the week after the sign went up, bound for Bergen with coal and coming home with timber. Before he left he tore a card from the back of the account book, drew the mark on it twice, and cut it straight down the middle with her embroidery scissors so each of them had a half that would only fit the other. Her half went into the tin with the bank book. His went into his coat, where it stayed through the spring, the summer and most of the autumn.

Ada repainted the sign every March after that, because the salt air took the letters first. She always left the small mark under the lintel, a little soft at the edges now, facing the water. One morning a parcel came addressed in a hand she did not know, and inside it was a card with the other half of a heart, lying on its side, cut clean down the middle.