Black outlined cartoon hands curving together around a solid red heart, a bold traditional style tattoo on the thigh.

Cartoon hands forming a red heart on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two cartoon gloved hands meeting at the wrists to form a heart shape, with a solid red heart sitting in the centre. The hands and heart are defined by thick black outlines, with short black strokes marking the fingers and a flat, unshaded fill. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the skin, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Traditional Thigh Heart Hand Cartoon Glove

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 gloves had been drawn three times before Ada Rudd was satisfied, and by then the ink on the first two had gone the colour of weak tea in the tin on her drawing board. Harold Pim, who ran the cartoon studio above the chemist's in Fenny Cross, leaned over her shoulder and sniffed. "Hands that can hold a teapot," he said, "that's all the audience wants. Not a valentine." She went on inking anyway, four fingers and a folded thumb on each glove, the two wrists meeting neatly in the middle.

Keep reading

The heart was her own idea. It sat between the cuffs like something the hands had been carrying all along, and when Harold saw the first proof he swore at it, then pinned it to the wall beside the others. The colourist, a widow called Mrs Tanner who did her work at the kitchen table, ran short of the good red that winter. So the heart on the final sheet was left flat and unshaded, a single bright shape with nothing around it but the black line.

The short ran at the Palace on Saturday matinees for two years. Children in the back rows copied the gesture with their own hands, and once a letter arrived from a boy in Lincolnshire asking if the gloves were real. Ada kept that letter in her handbag. When the studio shut in the spring of 1958, Harold sold the cels to a man from London for the price of a used van, and the rest of the paper went into the stove.

Ada kept back the last drawing, the one with the unshaded heart. She folded it once and slid it into her coat pocket, where it stayed for the rest of the bus ride home. Out of the window the hedges went past in their grey rows, and she kept one hand in her pocket, feeling the crease where the two wrists met.