Two black linework tattoos on the tops of bare feet in dark canvas shoes: a heart made of bicycle chain links with a sprocket on the left foot, and a heart framing a bicycle wheel on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chain heart and bicycle wheel heart on feet

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos sit on the tops of a pair of feet, each shown in dark canvas shoes with white toe caps and jeans cuffs above. The left foot has an open heart outline made of bicycle chain links with a sprocket at the upper left, and the right foot has a heart outline enclosing a spoked bicycle wheel. Both designs use black outlines with no shading or colour, and they are centred on each foot against a dark ground.

Other Heart Bicycle

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

You want to know about the hearts, then sit down, because my hands need something to do while I talk. Ivy Patel came into the shop on Chapel Street the spring the Co-op closed, dragging a sit-up-and-beg roadster with a buckled back wheel and a chain that had jumped its sprocket so often it had worn a groove in the cog like a river bed. She said she was courting a man who could fix anything except his own temper, and she wanted a heart she could ride about in.

Keep reading

I told her a heart was a daft thing to make from a chain, but I took the old links off anyway and spent three evenings with the pliers, bending each one into a loop and closing them in a row. Her Stan, who drove the number 9 bus, came round on the Friday to see what the fuss was about. He stood in the doorway with his cap in both hands and said nothing for a long while. Then he went home and fetched the wheel off his own bike, the one he'd ridden to the depot every morning for thirty years, and asked could I fit it inside a heart too, so the two would sit together on the shelf.

Nobody knew which of them had the bigger wheel till the Sunday. Stan's route got cut that winter, and then Ivy's mum went into the infirmary, and by Easter the two of them had moved into a flat above the fish shop with no yard for either bicycle. The roadster went for scrap. The wheel stayed on my wall. Ivy came in one last time with a sprocket she'd carried in her coat pocket for a year and asked me to fit it at the top of her heart, where the chain would catch on it and never quite run.

That's the one you're looking at, isn't it? Chain on the left, wheel on the right, and the sprocket sitting where a heart keeps its knot. I still have the pliers. Mind the step going out, love, the light's bad after four.