Small open book tattoo with a pink heart on the right-hand page, placed on the back of the neck and partly framed by dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book with heart on neck

Neck · Mixed · Photo

A small open book sits at the nape of the neck, drawn with a bold black outline and grey shading on the cover and pages. A pink heart is filled in on the right-hand page and is the only colour in the design. The close photo shows dark hair falling beside the tattoo and a hand with red nail polish at the top of the frame.

Neck Book Open book Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swell had the stockpot walking across the hob again, and Ada Penrose caught it with her hip without looking up from the book propped against the tin of flour. Forty years of splashes had softened its cover to the texture of felt. The trawler Marigold Rose rolled hard through the dark off Dogger Bank, and somewhere below her the engine kept up its steady, unbothered grumble.

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Her mother had written every recipe in that book in pencil, then gone over the good ones in ink, and where a dish had pleased her husband she drew a small heart in the margin. There were eleven hearts in the whole thing. Tonight Ada turned to the fish pie, the one with the heart and a smudge of butter, and read the note underneath in her mother's slanted hand: For when he comes in late and doesn't say so.

The skipper, Dougie Macrae, had not come in late in six years. He had come in on a stretcher. The crew had been eating tinned peaches and cold tatties since the Christmas run, and nobody had complained, which was its own kind of complaint. Ada peeled the potatoes in long curls, mashed them with the last of the cream, and flaked the smoked haddock into the sauce until the galley smelled like a harbour at dawn.

When the men came down, dripping and quiet, she set the plates on the table without ceremony. Macrae took the first one, looked at it for a long moment, then pointed his fork at the open page beside the pan. "Your mum's?" he asked. Ada nodded and pulled a pencil from behind her ear. Underneath her mother's note she wrote, in her own uneven hand, Late again. Eat it anyway, and drew a heart beside it, slightly crooked.