Three small black fine line tattoos of overlapping geometric heart outlines, one on each of three fingers of a hand.

Three small heart outlines on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Three matching small tattoos of interlocking heart outlines sit across the middle and ring fingers and the index finger of one hand. The linework is thin, dark and even, with a single continuous line forming each heart and an inner triangular loop crossing it. The soft, warm-toned photograph shows a pale tiled surface behind the hand.

Fine line Geometric Hand Heart Triangle Outline Loop Finger

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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

You are halfway up the spiral stair at Scarrow Point when the lamp above you begins its slow turn, and you stop to count the steps again because counting is what your hands do when your head is full. Three hundred and eleven. The same as yesterday, and the day before, when your brother Edwin was still alive to call the number back up to you from the foot of the stairs.

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The lens room smells of paraffin and salt. Your mother kept the light for nineteen years before the damp got into her chest, and her ledger is still open on the table where she left it, pages of tide times in pencil. In the margins beside them are small loops she drew each time a ship came home safe, hearts pinched into triangles with one line running through them, never lifting the nib.

You learned to draw them from her, though yours never came out so neat. On the night the Marigold went onto the Hanging Rocks you sat up with the wick and drew three of them on the back of your wrist with the stub of a carpenter's pencil. By morning the crew were walking in along the shingle, all eleven of them, counting themselves out loud like children at a fair.

Now you trim the wick and climb down again. Three hundred and eleven. At the bottom you open the ledger and draw one more loop beside your mother's. When the ink dries you see how the lines have locked together, each heart holding the next, and you leave the page open so the lamp can find it.