Traditional style red heart tattoo with black outlines and pins stuck through it, on the inner wrist of a hand with red nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red pinned heart on a wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red heart with a black outline sits on the inner wrist and forearm, with several pins or needles pushed through it from the sides. The linework is bold and even, and the red fill is solid with little visible shading. The hand is raised against a pale tiled floor, which fills the background.

Traditional Forearm Heart Pin Needle Hand Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Corran had been pinning hearts into the lining of her husband's coat since the winter the Hollin pit flooded. She cut each one from red flannel, stuffed it with wool from the ewes on the top field, and pushed a pin through the side for every shift he worked below. Her mother called it foolishness. Her mother also kept a heart on the mantel for thirty years, so nobody in the row said much about it.

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By March the coat bristled. Eleven pins stood out of the flannel like a hedgehog's spines, and the men walking to the cage would touch their caps as they passed the Corran door and not ask why. Each morning Ada counted them aloud, as if the mountain could hear and keep the tally too.

On the twelfth morning the second whistle never came. Ada stood at the window with the kettle boiling dry and the coat over her arm, watching the lane. Then Tom Brannigan came up it with his lamp still lit, and said her husband had gone back for the Pryce boy, and would she come down to the mouth of the drift.

She went with the coat. At the shaft top the men were quiet, and the cage rose slowly with two shapes in it, one carrying the other. Ada pressed the coat to her chest before she could think, and felt the pins go deeper through the wool. She counted them without meaning to. Twelve. Then she hung the coat on the nail by the door and left the last pin where it was, its head catching the lamplight, and did not count again.