Three black line drawings of hearts filled with paisley, leaves and berries, one with the word Love in script, shown as a tattoo flash design with no body placement.

Three outline heart designs with paisley and foliage

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Three black outline hearts are stacked vertically on a white background. The top and bottom hearts contain symmetrical paisley shapes, star-like centres and sprigs of leaves and berries, while the middle heart has a looping script word, Love, flanked by paisley and a vine. The linework is even and uniform in weight, with no shading or colour.

Botanical Heart Paisley Leaves Vine Berry Script Love Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harker had three hearts left to stitch before the Saturday shift came up the lane, and the thread in her lap was running low on the good dark red. She pressed the needle through the linen with her thumb and worked the paisley outward from the centre, the way her mother had shown her, so the curl would sit true when the cloth was folded.

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Her son Tom had been down the Wearmouth pit since he was thirteen, and he had never once come home without his neck grey with coal. Every Friday she sewed a heart into the corner of his handkerchief, and every Friday he pretended not to notice, tucking it into his pocket as if it were nothing. The other women in Cold Hesleden laughed about it, but they all did the same with their own sons' cloths.

On the third Friday in November the cage stuck at the bottom of the shaft for most of an hour. When the men finally came up, Tom was pale to the eyebrows and he held out his hand before anyone else could speak. The handkerchief was still folded in his palm, the red heart on top, the only clean thing about him.

Nell took it and said nothing, because the cloth had already said what needed saying. That night she stitched a small star into the centre of the next one, the eight-pointed kind her mother called a keeping stitch, and she gave it to him at the door without a word.