Pink ribbon crossing a black-outlined heart filled with scrollwork, tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Pink ribbon and scrollwork heart on a shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A pink ribbon loops across a heart outlined in black linework, and the heart's right half is filled with swirling black scrollwork. The ribbon is shaded with pink and darker red tones, while the heart stays largely unshaded skin with fine black curls. The photograph is taken close up over the upper back and shoulder, with a white strap visible at the top left.

Shoulder Heart Scrollwork Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tennant had kept the light at Scarrow Head for nineteen winters, and in all that time nobody had asked her to light it for a woman who wanted nothing from the sea but a safe road home. The woman came up the cliff path in March with a bundle of pink silk under one arm and a pair of scissors she did not know how to use. She said her husband's boat was overdue at Hallan, that the harbour master had given up on it, and that she wanted a ribbon tied to the gallery rail so the boat could find where to turn.

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Mags told her the rail was no place for silk. The wind would have it into the sea by morning. But the woman had already cut the length, and her hands would not stop shaking long enough to fold it back into the bundle.

So they tied it together, a loop over the iron and a long tail trailing toward the rocks. Mags showed her how to knot it so the gulls could not pull it free. The woman traced a curl of scrollwork on the back of Mags's glove with one finger, the way her mother had drawn hearts on steamed windows, and said the boat would come back on the spring tide.

It came back on the third tide, low in the water and without its engine. Mags saw the pink line from the lamp room and wept, which she had not done since her own mother died. The men aboard said afterwards that they had steered by that small stubborn colour against the dark, and that it had looked, from the water, like a hand held up.