Black and white photo of a small fine line heart tattoo with baseball stitching on the inner wrist, above a checked flannel cuff.

Baseball heart on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outlined heart sits on the inner wrist, with two curved lines inside it that resemble baseball stitching. The linework is thin and even, and the tattoo is shaded only in black ink. The photograph is taken in black and white against a dim background, with the wrist and tattoo centred and a checked sleeve at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Heart Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ball arrived in a freezer bag, which told me someone had carried it around for years without knowing what else to do with it. Dennis Mallory set it on my counter at the back of the shop on Sheaf Street, horsehide gone the colour of weak tea, one red seam hanging loose like a fraying hem. His son had caught it on the last day of the summer league in 1987 and had never let it out of sight since. Could I put it right? I said I could, but a re-stitch would change its shape a little. He nodded as if I had confirmed something he already suspected.

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I worked under the lamp for two evenings. The old thread came away in grey crumbs. Inside the cover I found a pencilled date and a name in a child's careful capitals, and I kept those in mind while the awl went in and out. Each stitch was a figure of eight, the way the original maker had laid them, so the seams sat flat and proud again, two neat rows curving round the leather like lines drawn by someone who had never been taught to draw a heart.

Dennis came back on the Saturday with his hands in his coat pockets. He turned the ball over, pressed a seam with his thumb, and was quiet long enough that I wondered if I had got something wrong. Then he asked whether I could put a small heart somewhere it wouldn't show, on the lining where only the stitches would know. I said I had never done that. He said neither had he, and he had been meaning to ask somebody for thirty-seven years.

I drew it in biro on the inside of the cover before I closed it up. It came out a touch lopsided. He looked at it for a long time, then said that was exactly how his boy would have drawn it, and tucked the ball into his coat as if it might still be warm.