Black and grey sketch-style anatomical heart with the words 'Pain demands to be felt' tattooed on the inner forearm.

Sketched anatomical heart with quote on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sketched anatomical heart with loose, scratchy linework and shaded areas sits on the forearm, with dark dots and splashes around its upper edge. The phrase 'Pain demands to be felt' is written across the lower part in a typewriter-style serif, partly cut off by the crop. The image is taken straight on against a plain background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Quote Text Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The upright in the back room of Gull Lane Chandlery had a dead e, so every notice Ruth Haskett typed for the lifeboat crew came out with a hole where the letter should have been. She never mended it. She said the gaps told the men which notices were hers. I was fourteen that summer, sweeping hemp fibre off the boards for a shilling a day, and I took her for a joke until the morning she slid a sheet of cream paper across the counter with one line on it.

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Pain demands to be felt, typed on a different machine, every letter whole. Beneath it someone had drawn a heart in pencil, loose and scratched, with ink dots flicked off its top edge like spray from a breaking wave. Ruth said her husband Tom had drawn it years back, while he sat with the surgeon at the lifeboat house. He kept his sketches in a biscuit tin, she said, and he never once drew a heart that was finished.

"Who's it for?" I asked. She took her glasses off and polished them on her cardigan. "Whoever comes off the next boat hurting," she said. "They don't need to know it was his line." Then she rolled a fresh sheet into the upright and typed out the Sunday rota, the dead e leaving its neat gap in every word that needed one.

I filled the gaps in with my pen, one by one, the way she showed me, and by teatime the notice read as if nothing had ever been missing.