Traditional style colour tattoo of a message in a bottle with a red heart and three flowers, sitting on the forearm.

Message in a bottle with flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A glass bottle with a cork stopper holds a folded paper with a red heart, and three flowers sit around it: an orange bloom at the lower left, a teal and cream bloom at the top and a yellow bloom at the right. Bold black outlines define the bottle, flowers and leaves, with solid colour fills and striped green leaves. The design wraps along the forearm, with faint teal swirls filling the background.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Bottle Heart Flower Paper Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cork had swollen so tight in the sea that Ruth had to work it loose with a bread knife, sitting on the harbour wall at Hastings while the lamps behind her buzzed like wasps. Inside, the paper had dried into a crisp little envelope, folded twice and tied with a loop of green cotton. When she unfolded it, the first thing to slide out was a red paper heart cut from a sweet wrapper.

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'Whoever finds this, I threw it off the end of the pier the night my brother left for Leeds. Mum planted the orange dahlias along the back fence and never once picked them, so I have been keeping the yellow ones in a jam jar on the windowsill for her. The teal ones are for the man at number nine who mends bicycles and says nothing, which is the nicest thing about him. If you know what the heart is for, keep it. I never did work it out.'

The postmark said Brighton and was fifteen years old. Ruth read the letter twice under the lamp, then looked across the harbour at the terraces climbing the hill, wondering which window had been the jam jar and whether the bicycle man had ever got his thanks. She had no pen that worked, so she took a parking ticket from her coat, wrote on the back in pencil that the heart was for being brave enough to send something out at all, and folded it small.

She pushed the paper through the neck, pressed the cork home with her thumb and climbed onto the wall. The bottle went into the black water under the lamps, bobbed once, turned its back on the town and began its slow way out towards France.