Black and grey tattoo of two heart outlines on a leg, each with hatched shading that suggests pine trees, in a sketchy style.

Two heart outlines with tree shading on a leg

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two heart outlines sit one above the other on a leg, drawn with a bold, slightly irregular black outline. Inside each heart, dense hatched and scratchy strokes form a pine tree shape in the upper heart and a grove of vertical trunks in the lower heart. The image is a black and white photograph, so the ink appears as black and grey, with the skin tone flattened to light grey.

Other Heart Tree Pine tree Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and let the fiddler rest his elbow. I am going to tell you about the gatepost at Carrow Edge, because my grandmother said no wedding in this valley should go ahead without hearing it. Tom Pell came home from France in 1919 with one good lung and a pocket knife his brother had carried through the mud. The first thing he did was walk up to Ada Lowther's kitchen door and ask her to climb the ridge with him, which she thought very forward, and so she went, to see what he would do.

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What he did was point at the pines. There was one tall tree on the ridge then, black against the sky, and he told her it was the only thing in the valley the army had not managed to cut down. He carved a heart around it on the gatepost. She carved a second heart beside it and they argued the whole afternoon over whether that one should have a wood in it instead. She won. The grove you can see is the one she planted the spring after the wedding, a trunk for every winter they spent apart while he worked the slate quarry over the hill.

The gatepost rotted in the great gale of 1947, and the grandchildren split it for kindling, all except the carved panel, which Ada kept under the clock on her mantel. When she died, the panel went to the eldest of the family, with a note in her spidery hand saying the pair of hearts should go to whoever could count the trunks without getting it wrong. Every couple who marries here walks up that ridge on the first fine morning and counts. Sometimes the number comes out even. Tom always said that was the point.