Black ink drawing of four stacked heart outlines with handwritten script words beside them, sketched on lined paper in a lettering design.

Stacked heart outlines with script words

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows four heart outlines stacked vertically, each with a handwritten script phrase running along its curve, with small filled hearts scattered between them. The linework is smooth, bold and even, in black ink with no shading. The design sits on a lilac sheet of ruled paper, filling most of the frame.

Lettering Heart Script Handwriting Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the sticky patch on the lino. You know Lorne House has eleven floors and a lift that only goes when it feels like it. Well, in the winter of the big frost that lift stuck dead between the fourth and fifth, and inside it was Ruby Haddow with a carrier bag of tinned peaches and a biro she never let out of her hand.

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She had a notebook too, a cheap lilac thing from the Co-op, and while the lights flickered she drew hearts down the ruled pages. One heart for Cora Delight, the hen her nan kept on the balcony until the council had words about it. One for the baby across the landing who slept through everything except the bin lorry. Each heart got a name running round its curve, the way you'd write on a birthday card when you're running late. By the time she reached the bottom of the page she'd made four, and the little filled ones she dotted between them were for the neighbours who'd knocked on her door with soup when her husband went.

The lift jerked, then coughed, and Ruby did what any sensible woman does in a metal box with nothing but a notebook. She wrote one more heart at the very bottom and printed the words ONE MORE beside it, meaning one more go, one more floor, one more chance. The doors juddered open on the fifth, and there stood her sister Pat with a torch and a face like thunder, shouting up the stairwell that the whole block could hear her.

Ruby tore that page out and pinned it to the notice board by the post boxes, where it stayed until the damp got it. Years on, I still walk past and see those four hearts climbing the wall, each one pointing the way up.