Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a rope heart enclosing a noose, with the words MISERY LOVES ME above and below, on a forearm.

Rope heart with noose and lettering on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rope drawn in the shape of a heart forms the outline, with a noose tied at the top and its loop hanging in the centre. The words MISERY LOVES ME appear in block capitals, one line above the heart and one below. The tattoo uses bold black outlines with grey shading on the rope, set against pale skin on a white towel.

Traditional Lettering Forearm Rope Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every winter the grey woman came up the causeway to Venn's ropewalk in the kingdom of Lessmoor, and every winter she asked old Harrow Venn for a fathom of his best hemp. She never gave her name. She only said that Misery loved her, and that she had come to be sure of it. Harrow had spun cordage for forty years and never been asked for anything so odd, but he gave her what she wanted. He knotted the length tight, worked a heart into it with a loop hanging from the top, and sent her home with a lantern to light the road.

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His daughter Ilse was the one who noticed the coins. Each winter they came back to the shop as smooth grey pebbles, and each winter the rope was a little lighter, as though something had been drawn out of it. She said nothing until the spring the woman's rope was left on the doorstep, frayed almost to nothing, with a note tucked under the knot in a hand that looked like her own.

Ilse sat up with it by the stove. She picked the loops apart one at a time, the way you would unpick a seam, and laid the strands flat on the flagstones until they made one long straight line. Then she carried the line down the causeway to the sea and, where the tide turned, she let it go. The rope rode the water out past the breakwater and did not come back.

The grey woman was not seen in Lessmoor again. Harrow said a heart was a poor thing to bind with rope, and that a spinner should always make something that can be cut loose. Ilse kept the lantern and lit it every night for the boats.