Solid black heart inside a dotted outlined heart, surrounded by a mandala pattern, tattooed in black ink on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black heart mandala on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black heart sits at the centre of an outlined heart with a dotted border, surrounded by a symmetrical mandala of dots, lace-like lines and small leaf shapes. The work uses solid black fills and fine stippled dots, with no colour. The design fills the inner forearm, with the heart as the focal point and the ornament spreading outwards across the skin on a white surface.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Heart Mandala Ornament Lace Leaves Dot

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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

Come closer, you lot, the lift's broken again so you've got time for this one. Up on the fourteenth floor of Harrow Court lived a woman called Maureen Pryce who kept her sewing in a biscuit tin. Every night, once the telly went off, she'd take out her crochet hook and a ball of thread the colour of cold tea, and she'd make lace, round and round, until the kitchen table vanished under it.

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Her neighbour Dessie came knocking one January with a burst pipe and a face like thunder. He stood in her doorway dripping onto the mat, and she sat him down, wrapped his cut hand in a tea towel, and asked him what he wanted. He said nothing. She said that was the right answer, then went to the tin and pulled out a little heart of black cotton, stitched so tight it felt like a pebble. She told him to keep it in his coat pocket, because it would keep the damp out of him.

Years went on. The lamps in the block went yellow and then went out, one by one, and the lace kept growing outwards from that small black heart, leaf after leaf, dot after dot, until the whole table was covered. When Maureen died, the council men came up with a van and a clipboard. They found the tin empty except for a doily pressed flat, its centre cut away in the exact shape of a heart, and Dessie's hand on the rail, still holding the pebble.