Black XO lettering with a small red heart between the letters, tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm.

XO lettering with a red heart on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the letters X and O in bold black lettering, with a small solid red heart sitting above the join between them. The lines are thick and fairly uniform, with slight softness at the edges. The black ink dominates, with the red heart providing the only colour against the warm skin tone, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Heart Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling since Tuesday, and the Hollin Arms had run out of everything but mutton and patience. I was the only guest with a paintpot, so Mrs Pell set me to repainting the inn sign while the lane was impassable. I had the black letters half-done, balanced on the top rung of a ladder, when her granddaughter Ada climbed up with a mug of tea and asked what the two letters were for.

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"Kisses and hugs," I said. "X for the kiss, O for the hug. Your great-grandfather painted them on the door of this place the year he married, and nobody has been brave enough to scrape them off." She looked at the gap above the join, where the letters met, and said it wanted something. I told her a heart, if she could find me the red. She found a tin of vermilion in the cellar, behind the cider, and held the lamp steady while I dabbed it on. The damp made it bleed at the edges, so I went over it twice, and by then the lamp had gone out and we were painting by the glow off the snow.

The carrier's cart came through at first light, the sky the colour of skimmed milk. Ada had slipped a folded bill into my coat pocket while I was loading my bag. On the back she had drawn the same two letters and the same small heart, with no name beside them and no message at all, only a crooked arrow pointing at the bottom corner, where she had written in pencil, *you forgot to sign it*.

I looked back from the cart. The lane had already filled in behind us, and the inn was just a dark roof under white. But the sign still caught what little light there was, and the red heart sat above the letters, still a little wet, the only colour for a mile in any direction.