Small black fine line tattoo of a heart and three upright strokes on the inside of a wrist, beside a red and black woven bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small heart and lines on wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo sits on the inside of a wrist, showing a heart shape with three upright strokes above it. The linework is thin and simple, with solid black ink and no shading. A red and black woven bracelet with a striped band reading FLAMENG is worn above the tattoo, and the background is softly out of focus.

Fine line Other Heart Line Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad's tally stick was the only honest thing in the orchard, and by the last week of August it had gone soft at the notches from being held. I kept the count for the pickers at Hallam's Pit, three strokes for every full bushel and a bar across each fifth, the way Mrs Okonedo had taught me before her knees gave out. Nobody else bothered to check my sums. They trusted a girl with chalk on her thumbs.

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On the Thursday the wasps came early and the Bramleys were splitting on the branch. Ruairi from the Tuesday gang climbed the ladder with a crate on his hip and asked whether I could help him with a cord. He had a red and black band bought from a stall by the station, the kind that goes grey after a month in the sun, and he wanted the knot tied properly. I told him a knot tied properly was no use if the cord was too short to finish it, and that a short cord was a sort of promise. He laughed at that, which I had not intended.

Afterwards he drew on the back of my tally card with my pencil: a heart, lopsided, with three short lines above it like steam off a kettle. He said it was the count of everything he had not said to his sister since March. I wrote the number underneath, the way I would for a crate, and handed it back.

Two weeks later the card came in the post, folded into quarters, with a new column of strokes down the margin in a hand I did not know. The orchard was bare by then, the windfalls gone to mush under the grass. I kept the card in the tin with the spare pencils, and I have never once checked the sum.