Solid black heart design surrounded by swirling scrolls and small hearts on a white background, shown as a flash-style drawing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black heart with swirls and small hearts

Black and grey · Flash

A large solid black heart sits at the centre of the composition, with three smaller hearts scattered to its upper right. Thin and thick black scrolls and curls wrap around the heart and extend towards the top left and bottom. The design is in black ink only on a plain white background.

Heart Swirl Scroll Curl

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 snow had kept the Coach and Horses shut for six days, and by the seventh Mrs Pellow had run out of candles and patience in roughly equal measure. She sent me up to the attic with a lantern and orders to fetch the box of old valentines, because Tom the ostler swore the children would sit quiet for a card or two.

Keep reading

The box smelt of damp wool and mothballs. Most of the cards were lace and pink paper, worn soft at the folds. One was different. A single black heart filled the centre, inked so thickly the paper had nearly split, and from it spilled curls and scrolls that looped out to the edges like frost creeping across a window. Three small hearts had been scattered to one side, as if they had broken loose and were trying to catch up. Beneath, in a hand that pressed hard, someone had written: For Eliza, who never wrote back.

I read it aloud in the taproom because nobody else would. Halfway through, a carrier called Haskett, snowed in since Monday with a bottle of Mrs Pellow's plum brandy, set down his glass. He said his mother had drawn every letter with a flourish like that, and that a card of hers had gone to the wrong inn in the spring of '31 and never come back. Nobody asked how he knew it was the same card. He simply held out his hand, and I gave it to him.

The thaw came on the eighth morning. When I cleared the frost from the taproom window, I found the same swirling lines had frozen onto the glass in the night, curling out from a patch where the fire's warmth had melted a single heart-shaped gap.