Black linework tattoo of looping swirls and a heart-shaped curl running vertically down a section of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black swirl and heart linework on skin

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical tattoo made of black curling lines, with a spiralled heart shape at the top that narrows into scrolls, loops and a small looped base. The linework is solid black with no shading, and there is no colour ink. The photograph is a close, straight-on view of the skin, with the design centred and a soft highlight across the skin.

Other Heart Swirl Scroll Loop Linework

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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

The iron came over on the Tuesday boat, wrapped in sacking like something pulled from the harbour, and Dougie Lyle would not let me touch it until the forge was roaring. Mam said he was being precious. He was being right. Bar stock from the mainland sits too long in cold yards, and this lot had gone brittle at the edges, so every cut had to be made slow and every bend warmed twice.

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Ishbel Ross wanted a gate for the sheep pen above her house, with a heart at the top that looked like the bracken fiddleheads uncurling behind the church each spring. I drew it in chalk on the stone floor first, the scroll tightening into a heart, the stem dropping in loops, a small curl at the foot like a fern that had given up halfway. Then I drew it again, and again. The wind off the Minch kept getting into the fire and the heart kept closing the wrong way, too tight on the left, sulky on the right.

I was ready to throw the whole length in the water when Dougie leaned on the anvil and said a fiddlehead never plans its curl. It just keeps turning in on itself until it finds the light. So I stopped measuring and let the iron go where the hammer sent it, and by the third evening the heart had opened properly, as if it had been waiting for permission.

Ishbel came up in her wellingtons the week the gate went on its hinges. She put her palm against the top scroll and said it held the warmth of the sun, though the sky had been grey for a fortnight. I kept the offcut, a curl no longer than my thumb, and it sits on my windowsill now. When the morning light comes through it, it throws a small black heart onto the wall, and I have never once got up to move it.