Black blackwork spiral heart tattoo on the palm of a hand held open, with heavily tattooed arms and legs of a kneeling person on grass behind it.

Spiral heart tattoo on a palm

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A person kneels on grass with the palm of one hand turned up towards the camera. The palm carries a solid black heart-shaped motif with inward spirals, a pointed base and a lace-like outline, with a small curled tail at the bottom. Other tattoos cover the forearms, chest and legs, and the photograph has a dark, muted green tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell the ferryman's daughter had a rule about the river, and the rule was that you never tell it your name. Her grandmother had taught her that, along with how to read the eddies by their colour and how to whistle up the tar-black eel that lived under the Greywater bridge. So when the stranger came down to the landing at dusk with a sack of wet salt on his shoulder and asked for passage to Ossery Isle, Pell said the ferry was full, which was a lie, and he said that was all right, he'd wait, and sat down on the bottom step with his palm turned up on his knee as if he were holding out a coin.

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There was a mark on that palm. A heart, or what a heart would look like if it had been folded in on itself a dozen times and pressed flat, with a curl of tail at the bottom like a tadpole that had given up. Pell had seen the same shape carved over the door of the drowned chapel, and cut into the bark of the willow where the dead used to be laid. She did not ask about it. You did not ask a man about the thing he carried in his hand.

He waited all night. Near the grey hour, when the mist came off the water like steam off a horse, he finally spoke. He said that the heart did not belong to him. It had been given to him by a woman who lived on the far bank, who had spun the spirals inward so that whatever she loved could never find its own way out, and that he had come to give it back before the spirals tightened for good.

Pell looked at his hand a long while. Then she untied the ferry rope, pushed off into the mist, and said nothing, because the river was listening, and the eel was already rising to see who would pay the fare.

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