Black and white photo of a fine line heart with a pointed tail tattooed behind a person's ear, beside several ear piercings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small heart with a tail behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small heart outline with a thin, pointed tail sits behind the ear on the side of the head. The linework is fine and mostly solid black, with slight tapering along the tail. The photograph is black and white and shows the back of the head and ear, with several ear piercings and loose hair in the frame.

Fine line Other Heart Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife would not climb the tower after the storm, so the keeper's son went up with the oil can himself. Nobody on Skerry Lowe had told him to. The lamp had guttered twice that night, the boats were still out past the reef, and his father lay in the cottage with a broken wrist and a voice like gravel.

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At the top the glass was black with soot. He cleaned it with a rag and a little spit, the way his father had shown him, and while he worked a small dark shape came up the stairwell, hopping one step at a time. It was the sort of creature sailors left saucers of milk for, though it had no face he could make out and a tail that curled up behind it like a question. It settled on the rail and watched him with the patience of something that had waited a long time for a fair bargain.

"Keep your light burning," it said, "and I will take the heaviest thing from your house and leave you the lightest." The boy thought of his mother, lost off the Lowe when he was four, and said nothing. The creature pricked its tail against the iron rail, and a bead of red appeared on the point. "Not her. Your father's heart, then. It will beat for the sea and never for the shore."

He lit the lamp. Dawn came grey and the boats came in one by one, and his father opened his eyes in the cottage and asked for tea as if nothing had happened. Every night after that the boy climbed the tower and trimmed the wick, and the tail stayed curled on the rail, and the old man never once walked down to the harbour to watch the boats come in.