Black and grey winged heart tattoo with the script words Only God knows why, on the top of a foot.

Winged heart and script on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a winged heart tattoo on the top of a bare foot, with the phrase Only God knows why in flowing script curving beneath it. The heart has shaded, scalloped feathering on its wings and softer shading across its surface, with bold outlines. The composition is close and angled, with the toes and painted dark nails visible on the right.

Lettering Other Heart Wing Script Phrase Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter from the diocese arrived on the morning the limes came into flower, and I read it twice in the cloister with a bee walking slowly across my knuckle. They wanted the carved heart above the infirmary door taken down before the masons came. Its wings had split along the grain in the frost, and someone on the chapter thought it unlucky to leave a cracked thing over the sick.

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I took it down myself with a borrowed chisel and a stepladder that wobbled. Under the old linseed I found the carver's pencil marks, rough scallops for the feathers, counted out in threes. Tucked into a slot behind the heart was a fold of paper gone the colour of weak tea. It held a dead brother's notes from a fever year, and at the bottom, underlined twice, were the words he had written for his own wonder rather than for any sermon: Only God knows why the bees stayed.

I did not mend the heart as the chapter wanted. I glued the wings back with hide glue, deepened each scallop with a gouge, and left the grain showing on the crown where the frost had been. When I hung it again above the door, the first warm afternoon brought the swarm down out of the roof in a long brown curtain, and it settled on the wings as if they had been cut to take a landing. I wrote to the diocese that the work was finished. I did not write why.