Colour tattoo of a green paintbrush with a pink paint stroke curling into a heart, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paintbrush with heart stroke on back

Back · Colour · Photo

A paintbrush with a green handle, orange ferrule and black-tipped bristles runs vertically down the skin. A pink-red paint stroke rises from the bristles and loops into an open heart shape at the top of the design. The linework is dark and solid, with soft shading in the stroke, and the red skin around the tattoo suggests it may be fresh.

Back Paintbrush Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat names were my living on Inishfarran, and when the money ran short the Hallorans paid me in mackerel. I had a sign-writer's brush, a size four with a green handle my father had whittled to fit my fingers, and a pot of vermilion that smelled of linseed and salt. Nobody on the island wanted a heart painted on a hull, so I never did one. Not until the summer Nessa Dunleavy asked me to paint her name on the stern of the Brightwater before she sailed for Galway.

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I told her the paint would not take on wet wood. She said she did not care, she wanted something of mine going out past the point. So I loaded the brush red and, instead of her name, drew one long stroke up from the bristles into the air, the way a gull writes on the sky when it turns. At the top I let the line curl over itself into a heart. It took the whole of one tide. My hand shook at the close, and the loop came out lopsided, which she said was the only honest part of it.

The boat went west on the Tuesday. Her name was never on her, only the heart, drying slowly in the spray until the salt took most of it. I kept the brush in the tin on the windowsill, rinsed and wrapped in oilcloth, and I did not paint another hull that year.

Every spring I hang the brush over the door to dry, and the first gull to cross the harbour tips a wing at it before it turns for the open water.