Watercolour-style heart tattoo in rainbow colours with black script lettering across it, on the lower limb of a person's skin.

Watercolour heart with script quote

Lettering · Other · Colour · Photo

A heart outline in fine black linework, with loose swirls at the top and tail, is filled with blended pink, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple washes. Handwritten black script runs across the heart, reading as a line about love, and the lettering stays sharp against the soft colour. The image is a close, straight-on photo with the tattoo filling most of the frame on a pale background.

Lettering Other Heart Rainbow Script Quote Swirl Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Carr Skerry there was a lighthouse, and in it a keeper called Orla Finch who had no patience for sentiment. The lamp was trimmed by six, the logbook kept in ink and never pencil. In the long winter evenings, when the boats stayed in harbour, she sat at the lamp-room window and mixed watercolours in a chipped saucer, because her brother had left them behind when he went south for work and never came back for them.

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One January a boy named Davy Rennick rowed out in a borrowed punt, soaked to the knees, carrying a letter from his mother asking the keeper to take him on as a lamp boy. Orla sent him back with the tide. He came again the next week, and the week after that, and by February he was sleeping in the boat shed and watching her paint the same sheet of paper every night: a heart, washed in every colour the sea had shown her, with words she wrote in pencil first and inked over once she was sure of them.

In March he fell from the gallery rail while clearing gull nests, and she carried him down the spiral stair on her back. When he woke with a split lip and a cracked wrist, he asked what the words on her paper said. She read them to him slowly. The greatest thing you ever learn is to love and be loved in return. He said it was a poor sort of lesson for a lighthouse. She said it was the only one that had ever kept her there.

By summer the paper hung above the lamp, the colours bleeding a little at the edges where the salt air got in. When the herring boats came up the channel at dusk, the men could see the heart from the mainland, though nobody on the shore ever agreed on what it was for.