Pink cartoon design of a broken heart with a gold outline and the word BESTIES across its two halves, decorated with white sparkles.

Split heart with BESTIES lettering

Colour · Flash

A flat illustration of a pink heart split into two jagged halves, each edged with a thick gold outline and marked with black linework. The word BESTIES is written in gold capitals across the halves, with white four-pointed sparkles scattered around the heart. The design is centred on a plain white background with bold, even colour and no shading.

Heart Lettering Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stall with the sagging tarpaulin is the one you remember, not for the rain but for Maeve, who is already holding two halves of a pink china heart up to the grey light. "Look, they nearly meet," she says, and they nearly do, their jagged edges grinding like loose teeth. The man behind the trestle table wants four pounds for the pair. You have three pounds forty and a bus fare home that costs two of them, so you dig through the lining of your bag for odd coins while the market shouts about cabbages and cheap phone cases.

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"Besties," Maeve reads aloud from the gold letters painted across the pieces, the paint worn thin where thumbs have rubbed it over the years. Her half says BEST. Yours says IES, which makes no sense on its own, and she laughs so hard she has to lean against the damp pole of the awning. The man sells them to you for three pounds forty without looking up. Maeve wraps her half in a bus timetable and tucks it into her coat, and you carry yours the whole length of the high street, the cold china pressing through your glove.

You never fit them back together. In March Maeve moves to Leeds for a job with a building society, and the phone calls thin out to birthdays, then to nothing but a photograph of a sea wall she sends at Christmas. The pieces end up in a biscuit tin with spare buttons and a watch that stopped years ago.

Then one evening you tip the tin out on the kitchen table looking for a key, and the two halves slide together with a small clean click, the gold lettering running whole across them for the first time since that wet Saturday. You stand there longer than you mean to, rain ticking at the window, holding them together with both hands.