Small black fine line tattoo of a heart outline containing script strokes and a cross-like mark, on the side of the torso.

Small heart outline with script on the side

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo shows an open heart outline with a cross-like stroke and a curved script mark inside it, plus a dot above. The linework is even and thin, with no shading, and the ink is solid black against pale skin. The tattoo sits in the centre of the frame on a soft, slightly blurred background of green and grey.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Heart Cross Script Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had bled in the rain again, so I had to read the address on Hector Ure's envelope twice before I could tell which house on the Sound it was meant for. Nobody on Scarva writes a clear hand anymore. The ferry comes across on Tuesdays when the sea allows, and the rest of the week the post sits in the biscuit tin beside my till, waiting for somebody to walk down from the hill and claim it.

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Hector had posted a letter every fortnight for nine years, always to the same flat in Glasgow, and every one of them ended with the same small mark. A heart drawn in a single unbroken line, a short upright stroke through its middle like the mast of a boat, and a dot pressed in above where the pen had rested. He told me once it was just his initials done quickly. I never asked him which initials. It was easier to believe the mark was a private joke between him and the woman who lived there.

The letter came back in October, stamped return to sender, the Glasgow address crossed out in a neater hand than his. I held it under the lamp for a long time. Then I took a sheet from the drawer and wrote to Mrs Lennox that the ferry was late again, that the gulls had got into the bins, and that the Ure boy had fixed the gate. I signed it the only way I knew how, with a heart, a stroke, and a dot.

I walked it down to the Tuesday boat myself. The deckhand asked whether the address was right, and I said it was, though I had no idea whether anyone would open it. The dot had smudged a little under my thumb. I left it that way.