Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an abstract figure with a small red heart and leafy branch on the upper arm and shoulder.

Abstract figure and heart on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large abstract figure with a stylised face and a geometric, patterned body runs down the upper arm, with a small red heart above it and a leafy branch rising toward the shoulder. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled dotwork shading and hatched and zigzag fills inside the shapes. Black and grey ink dominates, with a few small red touches on the heart and the figure's cheeks, and a sheer dotted lace-like pattern extends across the upper shoulder.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Figure Heart Branch Leaves Geometric pattern Dot Lace pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hebe Garrow had cut the figure from her husband's old lace curtains the winter the herring failed, and by March it had learned to stand in the window of the net loft without being propped. People in Whitby came to look at it. Some said it had her face, others said the eyes were all wrong, too wide and too sad for any woman who had kept a house on the cliff road.

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The branch arrived in April, though nobody planted it. A hawthorn sprouted from a crack in the loft floor, its leaves stitched with the same tight zigzags as the figure's skirt, and Hebe swore she had not sewn a single one. Her grandson Tom, who went out on the cutter with his uncle, said the sea had been bringing things in all week: driftwood bored through with dots by worms, scraps of sailcloth, a red bead of sealing wax that he pressed into the figure's cheek for luck.

On the morning the cutter did not come back, Hebe sat in the loft with her hands in her lap. The figure turned its head toward the harbour. Then it stepped down off the sill and walked out along the cobbles, its patterned hem trailing a lace of salt, and Hebe followed it down to the slip where the tide was turning.

It did not bring Tom home. It stood at the edge of the water with its small red heart lifted above it, the way a figure might stand waiting for a boat. When the cutter finally crawled round the headland, two hours late with its sail torn to lace, the figure was gone from the slip and Hebe was wet to the knees, laughing and not quite steady on her feet.