Bold black tribal-style design on a white background, with swirling flame-like shapes and a heart-like curl at the top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bold black tribal design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black tribal-style design drawn on a plain white background, made of thick curved shapes with flame-like points and spiralling curls at the top. The linework is bold and filled, with no shading, and the composition is a single vertical motif filling most of the frame.

Tribal Swirl Flame Abstract shape Heart

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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

Sit in close, and mind the embers, for this is a tale my grandmother told me, and her grandmother before her. Past the last cottage at Thornbury, where the lane gives up and becomes bracken, there stood a forest the villagers called Hollin Wood. Nobody cut there. The trees were grey with age, and their bark had curls in it like the hair of a sleeping child.

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In the winter of the great frost, a charcoal-burner's daughter named Nell Ashby went into the wood after her brother's lost goat. She found no goat. She found instead a fire burning in a hollow of stones, blue at the root and yellow at the tips, and it had no wood beneath it. It had a voice, low and patient, like a kettle thinking about boiling. 'I have been cold a long time,' it said. 'Feed me something warm and I will show you the way home.'

Nell had nothing warm but the wool scarf her mother had knitted, and the little tin heart she wore on a cord, which held a curl of her mother's hair. She hesitated only long enough to be honest with herself. Then she wrapped the scarf about a stick, fed it to the flame, and set the tin heart on the stones beside it. The fire rose, twisting upward in long curling tongues, and the smoke bent itself into the top of a heart, two loops lifting and folding over one another.

The fire led her out by morning, down the path to Thornbury, where her brother stood at the gate with the goat bleating at his feet. Nell never got the tin heart back. But that winter the chimney smoke of every cottage in the village bent the same way, and if you stand at the edge of Hollin Wood at dusk, you will see it still, curling over the oaks, looking for someone who is cold.