Two hands with small tattoos on the fingers and backs form a heart shape, with pink nail polish and the words Keep Calm and Love Ink overlaid in the centre.

Tattooed hands forming a heart

Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are pressed together with the fingers curled to form a heart shape against a black background. The backs of the hands and fingers carry small tattoos, mostly in black and grey with touches of green and red, and the nails are painted bright pink. A grey-teal crown graphic sits above the heart, with the words Keep Calm and Love Ink set in large type across the centre of the image.

Hand Hand Heart Crown Finger Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamb has been dead an hour when you come in from the top field, and Dad is already standing in the shed doorway with the lantern, saying nothing. The ewe is still heaving beside it in the straw. You kneel, and the cold goes straight through your jeans. Your fingers are too stiff to feel the wet wool, so you rub your hands together until they sting, then press your palms flat against her flank the way Mam showed you, your two hands curled round the dark fleece like a cupped flame.

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Mam used to say a shepherd's hands keep the year's tally. She had a row of small blue dots across her knuckles, pricked in at the Sunday market in Hexham by a woman called Dora who worked out of a caravan with a paraffin heater and a radio that only picked up one station. Each dot was a lamb Mam had got through the night. You never asked which ones had gone. You counted the dots instead, the way you count sheep through a gate, and you lost count the winter she stopped going out to the shed at all.

By first light the ewe is up, nosing at a second lamb that arrived small and bright-eyed and furious about it. You tie the ear tag with the pliers, your breath hanging white in front of you. Dad finally speaks. 'Your mother would have called that one Crown,' he says, because the fleece on its head grows in a ring, neat as a coronet. You laugh, and the sound goes out across the frost and comes back off the barn wall.

You carry the lamb to the kitchen where the range is lit. On the way you stop at the shed window, breathe on the glass, and draw a small heart in the mist with one finger. You rub it out with your sleeve before Dad sees, but the ghost of it stays on the pane, and the wind coming off the moor will take it by morning.