I kept every card they ever gave me.

Not deliberately, at first. Nobody decides to become a person who keeps cards. You put one in a drawer because throwing it out feels wrong, and then there is another one, and thirty years later there is a quantity.

Birthdays. Mother’s Day. The ones with no occasion attached, which my father was prone to.

For as long as my mother was alive, she signed the cards for both of them. That was simply how it worked in our house, and I never thought much about it. One card. One hand. Love, Mom. Love, Dad.

Then my mother passed, and my father started signing his own.

The cards themselves aren’t remarkable. There is a version of this story where they contain some perfect sentence that explains everything, but they don’t. They’re cards. Someone chose them at a drugstore. Most of the words inside them were written by someone none of us ever met.

What wasn’t printed was the last line.

Love, Mom.

Love, Dad.

That is the part I kept.

Years later, I decided I wanted those words tattooed on my arm. I didn’t have to search for a sample of their handwriting. I knew exactly where the cards were. I had always known where the cards were.

My original idea was to have Love, Mom and Love, Dad form an infinity symbol, but the tattoo artist told me the writing would have to be much larger than I wanted. My daughter and I started figuring out another design. We decided to put the words beside each other instead.

Then she asked if she could draw the heart that would go between them.

So that is what is on my arm now. My mother’s hand. My daughter’s heart. My father’s hand.

It wasn’t until later that I realized the two signatures aren’t really a matching pair. My mother’s comes from the years when both of my parents were alive, when she signed for both of them without any of us giving it a second thought. My father’s comes from the years after she passed, when there was nobody there to sign for him anymore.

When the tattoo was finished, I cried. I still look at it all the time. It reminds me how very much I was loved, but lately I have been thinking about something else.

I had been preserving those words for decades before I had any idea I would someday put them on my skin.

I thought I was keeping cards.

I was keeping their hands.

And now my daughter’s hand is there too, right between them.

I had been doing it for thirty years before I knew what it was.

Keeping them.

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