Solid black heart tattoo with knotwork and radiating lines on the back of a hand, with small X and O tattoos on the fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black heart with knotwork on the back of a hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large heart-shaped design fills the back of the hand, with bold black areas framing pale knotwork swirls and a small heart near the base. Fine radiating lines extend outward from the heart, and the shading is dense and solid. The image is in black and grey with a plain, tightly framed composition, and three small finger tattoos in the shape of X, O and X sit below the main design.

Blackwork Hand Heart Knotwork Sunburst Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta, the woodcutter's daughter at the edge of Hollin, quarrelled with her father over the ash trees he meant to fell for the lord's new barn. She took a knife and a heel of bread and walked into the wood before noon, and she did not come back for the rest of the day.

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Deep in, where the trees stood close and the light fell in stripes, she came to a clearing with a grey stone at its middle. An old woman sat on the stone winding thread round her fingers, and the thread never seemed to run out. "You want the ash to stand," the woman said. "Then you must cut something for me instead."

The woman told her what to carve. It was to be a heart in living oak, with lines running out from it the way the sun runs out from behind a cloud. Inside the heart Marta must work a knot with no beginning and no end, and at its base she must cut a smaller heart, no bigger than a thumbnail. She worked three days on a fallen oak with the old woman's knife, her fingers bleeding into the grain, until the last loop of the knot closed under her thumb and would not come apart.

When she carried the carving home, the lord's men had already gone to the next valley to look for timber, and the ash stood untouched at the edge of the wood. Her father hung the carving above the hearth and never asked what it had cost her. In Hollin they still say that the little heart at the base is always a little warm to the touch, and that no one fells a tree at the wood's edge without leaving a loaf on the grey stone first.