Fresh colour tattoo of a split heart, with a blue wave on the left and an orange and red flame on the right, on the back of the neck.

Split heart with wave and flame on neck

Neck · Colour · Photo

A small heart is split down the middle, with the left half filled in blue with a swirling wave-like pattern and the right half in soft yellow and orange with a red outline and a curling flame-like form. The linework is bold and the shading looks soft, and the skin around the tattoo is still slightly red, suggesting it is freshly done. The photo is taken from behind, showing the back of the neck with a gloved tattooist's hand at the left edge and the subject's face out of frame.

Neck Heart Wave Flame Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Their mother had split the heart down the middle before the boat ever left Skerra, and she made Ingrid swear not to look at the second half until the ship was past the Hebrides. Ingrid kept it wrapped in oilcloth against her ribs for nine weeks. When the Dorothea rolled through the gale off Cape Wrath with the cargo shifting below, the first mate, a Glaswegian called Pell, grabbed her wrist and shouted that the next sea would come over the rail.

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She did not unwrap it. She counted instead: the bell at the bow, the breaths of the man beside her, the swings of the lamp on its hook. By dawn the water lay flat as pewter and a streak of cloud burned orange over the eastern edge of the sea. Pell said the old sailors called that the sea's kindling, and that a ship which saw it would make land. Ingrid unwrapped the oilcloth then. The left half was blue, with a curl of wave turning in on itself. The right half was the colour of coals, with a tongue of flame leaning toward the seam where the two met.

The ship made Leith in the third week. Ingrid walked up from the quay with her wages in one pocket and the heart in the other, and at the first smithy she asked the smith to bank his fire so she could hold the metal to the coals. He riveted the two halves along the seam, wave to the left and flame to the right, and she carried it home to Skerra. She laid it on her mother's table and said only that it had held.