Close photo of a bare foot on grass showing a diagonal chain of four red pixel-style hearts with black outlines on the outer ankle.

Pixel hearts on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A bare foot and ankle rest on grass, with a thin green beaded anklet worn above the ankle bone. A chain of four pixel-art hearts runs diagonally up the outer ankle, each filled in red with a black outline and decreasing in size towards the top. The shallow depth of field blurs the green background, keeping the tattoo and the anklet in focus.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The health bar had to be four hearts, Dennis said, because four fitted across the top of the screen without covering the score. I had sixteen by sixteen pixels to make a heart a child could read from the far side of a bedroom, and I spent a wet March weekend at the kitchen table with graph paper and a rubber that kept tearing.

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The first heart I drew was too round. It looked like a plum. Dennis held it up to the monitor and said nothing, which was worse than a complaint. By Sunday night I had a shape with a notch at the top and two lobes that slumped inward like tired shoulders. I filled it red, then drew the black outline one pixel thick, because anything thinner vanished on the cathode glass.

The trick was the shrinking. Each heart had to be a fraction smaller than the one before, so the player could see the damage at a glance without reading a number. I drew the fourth heart last, the one that flashed when you were nearly dead, and it was barely bigger than a grain of rice. I remember feeling foolish about caring so much over a shape the size of a full stop.

Dennis shipped the game in May. Years later, in the reference room of a library in Rotherham, a boy showed me the same four hearts on his phone, the top one still full and the last one hollow. He had no idea who had drawn them, and I didn't tell him. I just watched him lose a life, the hearts getting smaller, and he laughed as if it were a good joke.

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