Black line drawing of a sleepy cloud with closed eyes and a small smile, with solid hearts falling beneath it like rain.

Sleepy cloud with falling hearts

Black and grey · Flash

A simple outline of a cloud with a smiling face, closed eyes with lashes and a small curved mouth. Beneath it, dozens of small solid black hearts fall in a loose scattered pattern, suggesting rain. The uniform black line and flat solid fills sit on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Cloud Rain Heart Smile Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You were mending nets on the harbour wall when the first heart landed on your wrist. Old Mairi, who kept the post office and had opinions about weather, said the cloud over Skerrin had not slept since the drowned bell was lifted. Now it had shut its eyes, lashes and all, and it was smiling in its sleep.

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The hearts came down soft and small, scattering over the slate roofs, catching in the gorse, pooling in the rock pools where the crabs wore them like brooches. Nobody could say whether they were rain or a kindness. Mairi swore they tasted of salt and sugar. Your younger brother tried to catch one in a jam jar, and it simply lay on the glass, pulsing faintly, until he let it go.

By evening the island had gone quiet in the way it only did when someone was dreaming hard. The ferry captain came ashore without his cap. The lighthouse lamp turned more slowly. You walked up the moor path and found the cloud sitting low over the heather, close enough to touch, its face soft and undisturbed. Someone had to keep watch, the old women said, or the dream would drift out to sea and never come back.

So you sat with it through the night, counting hearts as they fell, and when the sky finally paled over the water the cloud stirred, opened one eye, and nodded at you as though you had been given a job. The hearts stopped. Down in the village a door creaked open, and somebody began to hum.