Black and grey tattoo across the upper back of three heart-shaped frames with script names, with a blue star and a smaller heart above.

Three hearts with script names on upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

Three heart-shaped frames sit in a row across the upper back, each containing a soft black and grey sketched figure in a cuddling pose, with script names above the outer two and the centre one. A smaller heart with a star inside sits above them, beneath a solid blue star near the neck. The shading is soft and smooth, and the colour is limited to the blue star against an otherwise greyscale design on a flushed back.

Lettering Realism Back Heart Star Script Name Figure Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frames were meant to be finished by the Thursday boat, and by Wednesday night Ailsa Mackie had only two of the three sanded. She sat at the kitchen table with the lamp pulled close, rubbing linseed oil into the lip of a heart she had cut from driftwood, while the wind leaned on the window and worried at the latch.

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Her brother had posted the photographs from Glasgow in a brown envelope, three prints of babies asleep against their mothers' shoulders, all of them grey as old pewter because the lab had printed them that way. Ailsa had wanted colour. Iain had said the island was colour enough and she should stop being precious about it. So she worked in greys, the way the rain worked, and tried to keep the edges clean.

The small heart above the others she had carved last, from a plank that came ashore after the winter gales, with a five-pointed star picked out in the grain. It had taken her three nights. She had hung it on the wall as a test, and it looked right, though she could not have said why.

On Thursday the ferry came in through a wet dawn and Iain stepped off with a canvas bag and a face she had not seen since their father's funeral. He stood in the doorway and looked at the wall for a long time. Then he took a pencil from his coat and wrote three names under the frames, Isla, Ewan and the smallest, Rory, the letters leaning into one another like people sheltering from the rain. Ailsa did not tell him pencil fades. She let him have the wall.