Colour tattoo of a pink heart with a scalloped yellow, orange, green and blue border and the words BE KIND, in a traditional style, on the upper arm.

Be Kind heart on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pink heart with dark outlines sits at the centre of the image, with the words BE KIND across its middle and dark scrolling flourishes and teardrop shapes around it. The heart is edged with a scalloped border that shifts from yellow and orange at the top to green and blue at the bottom, and a partial flower is visible at the upper right. The solid colour fills and bold black outlines are set against plain skin, with the lettering kept clear and central.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Heart Lettering Flourish Flower

Find an artist for this

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 shortbread tin had been swollen shut since the damp came in March, and I was working a butter knife round its rim when the ferry horn sounded across the sound. That meant Dougie would be at the hatch before the ramp was down, wanting his order for the crew. I gave the lid one more push and it gave all at once, the way Mam's things always did when you stopped asking nicely.

Keep reading

Inside were no biscuits. Under a sheet of greaseproof, in her round hand, lay a list of ferry times for four winters, a bank book with a fiver in it, and a heart-shaped cutter with scrollwork along its edge. The pink enamel had gone chalky at the rim. She had pressed that pattern into every round of shortbread she ever sold from the front window, scallops and all. A slip of card was folded around the handle, and on it she had written in capitals that leaned forward as if in a hurry: BE KIND. NOT NICE. KIND. Someone had gone over the last word so hard the card had torn.

I read it three times before Dougie started hammering on the hatch. I took it for one of her jokes at first, the kind she made about tourists and the price of diesel. Then I remembered the winter the Hendersons' boy went out in the sea without his lifejacket, and how she sat at the counter with the kettle going cold, baking a tray for his mother without one word of pity in the whole batch.

I served Dougie and gave him his change. Then I pressed the cutter into the next round of dough, the heart coming up clean and sharp, and before I closed the tin I wrote BE KIND on its lid in pencil, where I would see it every morning.