Close-up of a black brush-stroke heart pierced by a vertical arrow, surrounded by teal, purple, orange and pink watercolour splashes on skin.

Brush heart with arrow and watercolour splashes

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bold black brush-stroke heart is pierced vertically by an arrow or dagger-like line that extends beyond the heart at the top and bottom. Soft watercolour-style splashes in teal, violet, orange and pink surround the black linework and fade into the skin. The composition is centred, with the black ink giving strong contrast against the loose colour washes.

Back Heart Arrow Watercolour splash Brush stroke

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the fiddle case. You want the story of the heart on Ruth Gillies's boat, so I'll tell it once. Her Eddie had gone out past the breakwater the November before and never come back. She climbed my stairs above the chandlers with a tin of black enamel and a face like a shut door, and asked for an arrow through a heart, because that was how it had hit her, straight through with no warning.

Keep reading

I didn't like it. Black on old wood can look like a funeral notice if you let it, so I went at it fast, the way you'd write a shopping list, letting the stroke thin out where my wrist gave up. The heart came off the brush lopsided and lovely, and the arrow ran past it at both ends as if it had somewhere else to be. Then the rain came sideways off the Channel and I had to work with the door open. Every colour I had got onto the board before I could stop it: teal from the boat's old trim, violet from a pot I'd been saving, orange, and a pink that wasn't quite a rose. They bled into the black and ran out to the edges.

Ruth stood in the doorway dripping and said it looked like weather. I said it was meant to be weather. She pressed her palm flat on the wet paint, the way you'd test a loaf, and said, "Leave it, then." So I left it, and by morning the colours had sunk into the grain as if they'd been there first.

That boat went out every dawn for eleven years with the heart on her bow, and not one fisherman asked why it was splashed like a painter's rag. Ruth just said it kept the gulls off. Now have your drink, and somebody fetch me a chair before the fiddler starts.