Pencil sketch of a shaded winged heart with a banner reading Love and a treble clef, a flash design with no body placement shown.

Winged heart with Love banner

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a heart with feathered angel wings spreading out from either side. A ribbon banner across the lower half reads Love in script, and a treble clef and dripping shapes hang below it. The shading is soft and grey, with highlights on the heart and wings and darker tones at the join of the banner and the feathers.

Heart Wing Banner Love Treble clef Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The upright in our front parlour had gone flat by the first gale of the autumn, and Mr Vance was the only tuner on that stretch of coast who would climb the cliff road for it. He came every October with a roll of hammers in green baize and a flask he never offered anyone, and he took the back room at Gull Rest for three weeks, the same as he had done since my mother's time.

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That year the damp had got into everything. Water ran down the wallpaper behind the piano and dripped into an enamel bucket I emptied twice a day, and the felt on the middle C hammer had swollen so it would not strike clean. Mr Vance knelt on the boards with his ear to the soundboard, eyes shut, tapping one key over and over like a man knocking at a door he did not expect to be answered.

On the last evening he sat at the stool and played me a tune I did not know, something with a bright line running down the page and a curl at the bottom that he said was called a clef. He hummed words under his breath, though I could only make out one of them: love. Then he closed the lid, refused the extra banknotes I offered for his bed, and handed me a pencil sketch from his case, a heart with feathered wings and a ribbon across its middle drawn with a loose hand.

I tuned the middle C myself the next morning with his spare hammer, badly at first and then right. The note rang out over the sea wall, and the bucket stayed dry. I kept the drawing in the piano bench, and when the gales came round again I took it out and looked at the shading where the wings met the ribbon, dark as the water under the pier, before I shut the lid on it.