Black line drawing of two outlined hearts, each with a looping tail that twists back on itself, on a plain white background.

Two outlined hearts with looping tails

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two separate heart outlines, one larger and higher on the left and one smaller on the right, each drawn as a single tapering line. Both hearts end in a loop that crosses the outline and forms a tail. The linework is solid black with varying thickness and no shading, set against a plain white background.

Heart Line drawing Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your grandad never could bend wire straight, and he used to say the trick was to let the wire tell you where it wanted to go. Forty years at Hollis Wire on Cornish Street taught him that. Every Friday the foreman handed over a coil of brass as thick as a knitting needle, and every Friday he turned out hearts for the coconut shies at Skegness, pinched and looped until the tails crossed over like a bad knot.

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The summer of the big storm, a jeweller in Leeds wanted something finer, two hearts to hang on one chain. Grandad started the first one, a fat heart, and the wire ran off down the side and came back up to make a tail that would not be argued with. He tried three times. Each time the tail slipped through its own loop and out the other side, and each time he swore at it, then laughed, because it looked like something that had made up its own mind.

A woman came into the shop on the last Thursday, a hatpin in her collar and a parcel wrapped in brown paper. She had lost her husband to the sea off Mablethorpe that winter and wanted two hearts for a chain, one for him and one for her. Grandad gave her the pair without charge. She turned them over in her palm and said the tails were the part that mattered, because they were the bits still holding on to each other.

The small heart is on my windowsill now, its tail hooked through the big one's loop, and I have never once managed to pull them apart. Mind, I've tried.