Black linework tattoo of a mother holding a child in silhouette, with three red hearts, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mother and child silhouette with hearts on back

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The tattoo shows a bold black outline of an adult cradling a child, with the head and shoulders formed by sweeping curved lines. Three solid red hearts sit inside the figures, between the arms and chest. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the skin, with the design centred and filling most of the frame.

Back Mother Child Silhouette Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tessa sat on the back step of the potter's shed with the baby asleep against her collarbone, watching the kiln smoke thin over the roofs of Durovernum. Three firings had cracked that spring and sold none of the pots. The coins for the wool were in a jar under the hearthstone, and she knew to the obol how many days they would last.

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Her son Brannoc was seven and had stopped asking why his father's cart did not come back down the Watling road. He sat in the wet clay with a bone stylus, cutting curves that swept round each other like the bay at high tide. When she leaned over to look he shrugged her off and said it was a surprise, and she let him keep it.

At midwinter she traded her grandmother's bronze pin for a sack of barley and three cakes of red ochre from a carter who looked at her too long. That night Brannoc pressed the ochre into the hollows of his design with his thumb, three small hearts set where a body would hold a child. He fired it on the coolest shelf without telling her.

In the morning the tile was still warm. A woman bent over a smaller one in black lines, her arms falling in long arcs, and the red marks glowed inside her like coals banked for the night. Tessa held it in both hands until the wind off the river found the gap under the door, and then she carried it inside to where the fire was.