Three small red pixel-art hearts with dark outlines tattooed on the inner wrist, next to a pale green sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three pixel hearts on the wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Three small pixel-art hearts sit in a row on the inner wrist or forearm. Each heart is filled with red ink and outlined in black, with the blocky, stepped edges of an 8-bit game sprite. The photograph is taken at close range against a pale skin tone, with a pale green sleeve at the left edge and a warm yellow wall behind.

Forearm Heart

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and leave the cooler lid alone, it's the only cold thing left in Saltmouth. You want the story with the coyote in it or the one without? The coyote is the honest one, so I'll give you that. Out on Route Nine there was a woman called Dolores Wren who drove a rust-coloured Corolla with a cracked windscreen and a cassette stuck on side two. Every mile she counted her lives the way kids count on the cabinet at the diner, three little red hearts blinking in the corner of the screen. Three hearts, and once you lose them all the machine swallows your coin and tells you to try again.

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The first heart went at the wash by Dry Lake, when a tyre let go and the car slid down the shoulder like a dropped bag of gravel. The second went in a dust wall so thick she drove with her headlights off and her nose to the glass, singing a song she couldn't remember the words to. The third she was saving for the bad bit, which is what everyone says before they need it. Somewhere past the sign for Agate Flats she came to the stone well where old Ezra Pell sells lemonade for a dollar a cup, and she asked him, is a heart a thing you can spend twice?

He poured her a cup and said a heart only spends the way you let it. Then he pointed at the road, where the heat rose off the asphalt in bright ribbons, and said the rest was just counting.

Dolores drove on with the window down and the last heart still lit, and in the rear-view mirror three small red squares kept blinking, patient as a machine that has never once been asked to stop.