Watercolour-style heart tattoo in pink, purple and blue with a black script letter D at the centre, placed on the side of the ribs.

Watercolour heart with script D on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A heart outline made of loose pink, purple and blue watercolour splashes sits on the side of the torso, with a black cursive letter D in the centre. The edges are soft and spattered, with fine dots of ink around the heart, while the script letter has crisp, dark linework. A gloved hand rests at the left edge of the frame and the lower edge of a lace garment appears at the top.

Ribs Heart Script Splashes Monogram

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Teague had been mixing the same blue for three evenings, and it still came out like the sky over the colliery before rain. The lamp room at Shadwell Pit smelled of paraffin and wet wool, and the men's tins stood in a row along the bench, each with a name chalked on the lid. She wasn't meant to touch the pigments. Mr Pryce had said the watercolours were for the chapel banners, not for a girl who sat up after shift with a jam jar of rinse water.

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The heart was for Dennis Lowe, who came up off the night shift with his hands black to the wrist and asked her, very politely, whether she could put something on paper that would make his wife laugh. She drew the outline freehand, then let the colour go where it wanted: pink first, bleeding into purple where the brush was still wet, then a cold blue dropped in from the side so it spattered like rain on the pit-head windows. She left a clean white hollow in the middle for the letter.

The D she wrote with a steel nib, the way her mother had taught her to sign the Co-op ledgers, looping and sure. Dennis watched her finish and said nothing for so long she thought he didn't like it. Then he held the paper up to the lamp so the colours glowed through, and said the splashes reminded him of the sea at Blackpool, before the war, before the mine had him.

She folded it into his tin, under the wet rag, where nobody would think to look. By spring every lid on the bench had a small wet heart on it, each with a different letter in the centre, and the men carried them home in their pockets to a cousin in Consett who kept a steady hand and a box of needles.