Matching mother and daughter heart tattoos

Mrs Kinnear ran the needle from the back room of the chandlery, between coils of rope and tins of marine paint. She had drawn the heart herself on tracing paper, a fat shape with a tail of scrollwork looping through it like the wake behind a dinghy. Mum wanted the words in the middle, in a script that leaned as if into a headwind. I wanted it plain. We argued in the queue at the bakery and lost, as we usually did.

Mrs Kinnear shaded the heart in grey, darker at the edges so it looked pressed out of pewter. The machine hummed and nobody talked. When it was done she handed Mum a mirror, then me one, and I watched the same heart and the same two words appear backwards in the glass, sitting where I could only see them if I twisted my neck. I suppose I expected it to feel like a promise. It felt like a label on a tin.

We walked down to the pier with the horn already sounding. Mum stayed by the rail while I climbed the gangway, and when I turned she had her hand flat against her own back, pressing through her coat as if she could feel the ink from there. The boat pulled away from the stones. Behind us the island got smaller, and the scrollwork I could no longer see went on curling through its heart, the way the tide does, in the same direction every time.