Woman in a white V-neck top and black lace bralette, with a thin outline heart tattoo on the upper chest and a blue letter A tattoo on the upper arm.

Outline heart and letter A tattoos

Fine line · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A close crop shows a woman's upper torso, wearing layered spiked necklaces, a white V-neck top and a black lace bralette, with her face out of frame. A small heart tattoo is drawn in a thin black outline on the upper chest, and a letter A tattoo with blue and teal shading sits on the upper arm at the lower right. The composition is tight and centred on the chest and necklaces, with soft natural light.

Fine line Lettering Chest Upper arm Heart Lace Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The heart was only a pencil line when Dora Quill first saw it, drawn on the back of a ration ticket by the Merrow's cook, who could not draw and said so himself. He had asked her to keep it safe until they reached Valparaíso, where a tattooist with a brass kettle of ink would prick it into his chest for good. Dora folded the ticket into her sea-boot and forgot it through three gales and the burial of a stoker who had sung too loudly off the Horn.

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The letter A came later, after the boy Alder went over the side in the dark. The cook wanted it shaded the colour of the water that took him, a teal that went deep blue at the edges where the light gave out. Dora had no ink, so she boiled soot from the galley lamp with a spoon of rum and mixed it in a tin. She strung a necklace of grey urchin spines she had gathered at Tristan, sharp as cat's teeth, and wore it against her collar so the wind would have something to argue with.

At Valparaíso the tattooist had shut up shop and gone to his sister's in Concepción. The cook sat on a crate on the quay with his shirt open and said nothing for an hour, so Dora fetched the tin and the tin of needles from the sail-loft.

She pricked the heart first, because it was the easier of the two. When he asked why it was drawn so thin, only an outline with nothing inside it, she told him a heart should be left open so the sea could come through it, and that was the only lesson she had learned from the voyage that she meant to keep.