Black line drawing of a Claddagh design, showing a heart held by two hands beneath a crown, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Claddagh design with heart, hands and crown

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of the Claddagh motif: a heart held between two hands, with a crown above and a banded collar at the top of the heart. The linework is bold and even, with dotted detailing on the crown and collar. The heart is left unshaded and the composition is centred on a plain white background.

Heart Hand Crown

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

Tomas Mulry had been hammering the same silver for three days when the boat came in without his brother. Out past the Aran light the sea had taken Liam and left the nets, and the village women came up the quay in their black coats to see who would be fed that week. Tomas kept his bench by the window of the goldsmith's on Quay Street, because the bench was the only thing in Galway that still made sense to him.

Keep reading

Old Nuala Dwyer, who had bought every ring from that shop for forty years, came in on the Tuesday and set a folded handkerchief on the counter. Inside lay a silver band with two hands worn almost smooth. She wanted a heart cut for it, and a crown over the heart, and she wanted it to be the sort of heart a person could hold between two palms without dropping it. "Make it plain," she said. "Liam always said the crown was for fools who needed telling."

Tomas worked through the night with the lamp hissing. He drew the hands first, cupping, then the heart pressed between them, then a crown with its tiny dotted beads. When he finished, the heart had no shading, nothing to say whose it was. He had meant to engrave initials on the inside of the band, and found he could not.

Nuala came back at dawn. She turned the ring over, looked a long time at the empty heart, and laughed once, sharply, the way the sea does. "Good," she said. "Now it's a heart that's waiting for someone to come home to it." She slid it onto her thumb, the only finger it would fit, and walked out into the grey light without paying.