Traditional style tattoo of a solid black heart with a scalloped outline, framed by pink, red and orange flowers and green leaves, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black heart with flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black heart with a scalloped white-edged outline sits at the centre of the design, with bold black linework. Clusters of pink, red and orange five-petalled flowers and green leaves wrap around its right and lower edges. The tattoo is shown on a forearm against a dark background, with a hand resting at the lower right of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Heart Flower Leaves

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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

Right, settle down, the urn's only just boiled, so you'll have to hear me out before the tea. You all remember Mr Fenwick's art room, the smell of turps and wet paper. What you don't remember is the board he kept above the sink.

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It was a slab of black-painted hardboard, scalloped at the edge with a white chalk line like a doily on a Sunday tea table. Every term he asked us to fill the border with something that grew. There were sixteen of us, and only Pauline Hyde would paint the flowers properly, five petals each, as if a nun had taught her. Nobody ever saw the heart filled in. It stayed black because Fenwick said the heart was the question and the flowers were the answer, and we weren't to answer until we knew what it asked.

The spring of '71, Dennis Carr went off to Doncaster with his mum and never sent a card. That afternoon Pauline took the brush and put orange on the lowest bloom, the one nearest the point, and she never said who it was for. Fenwick found it on the Monday and left it alone. He said the heart had waited long enough to belong to somebody.

So I'll give you the answer, since you've all come back to look at each other. Dennis is sitting by the urn, Pauline's gone, and the board is still above that sink. Go and look before you leave, find the orange flower, and ask yourselves who you were leaving the answer for.