Black outline tattoo of a mouse-ear silhouette with a small red heart inside one ear, on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mouse-ear silhouette with red heart on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A black outlined tattoo shows a rounded mouse-ear silhouette with a swirled tail curling off to the left. A small solid red heart sits inside the upper ear circle. The bold, even black linework contrasts with the bare skin around it, and the design sits on the ankle, photographed at a slight angle.

Ankle Mouse ears Silhouette Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stamp had been cut from a cork by Ivy Brannan the winter her husband took the Carlisle night mail, and it had lived in the drawer of the lost property hatch ever since. Nobody at Hexley Road could say why it was round at the top and trailed a curl off the bottom like a question mark that had lost its nerve. Ivy said it was a signal. Dennis, the porter, said it was a cork.

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Every Thursday she pressed it into the ink pad and marked the corners of the undelivered parcels: a darned bundle of socks for a farm near Wigton, a tin of humbugs with no address, a cricket bat somebody had left under the clock. The red heart she added herself with a dab of sealing wax, always inside the upper circle, where a tired eye would catch it first. Dennis asked once who the parcels were really for. She said the people who would know to look.

The turn came in March, when the cork split down the middle. Ivy sat up with the broken stamp and a penknife, meaning to carve a replacement from an offcut of the drawer's lining, and found a folded slip tucked underneath. It was her husband's handwriting, a small sketch of exactly this shape with the tail curling left, and beneath it, in pencil: Keep the heart small. Easier to find that way.

She carved the new one that night, heart and tail and all. At the Thursday sorting she stamped the first parcel off the 6.12 from Carlisle, and when the label turned out to be in his hand, Dennis read it over her shoulder and said nothing at all, which for Dennis was a speech.