Traditional style colour tattoo of two clasped hands inside a red heart with a beaded border, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clasped hands in a beaded heart on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A colour tattoo of two hands clasped together inside a large heart, with one hand showing red nail polish. The heart has a red and yellow outline, a border of white beads and grey shaded scrollwork behind the hands. Black linework and grey shading give the hands and background depth against the skin.

Traditional Forearm Heart Hand Clasped hands Scrollwork

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 ring would not fit until Thursday, the jeweller said, so Maeve wore her mother's on a loop of red thread and kept her hand in her coat pocket through the whole wedding breakfast. Her cousin Ruth had already been to the parlour on Stanhope Road, and she kept turning her arm over under the trestle lights to show anyone who asked. The heart was still raw, a little pink at the edges, and the artist had drawn the hands from a photo Ruth's fiancé had taken on the pier, fingers laced, one wrist bent so the red polish caught the light.

Keep reading

Ruth had chosen that polish at seven that morning, standing in the bathroom of her mum's semi with the window open, and by the time the photographer asked for hands-only shots it had already chipped on the index finger. Maeve remembered Ruth swearing softly and then laughing, because Ruth never got anything exactly right and had decided long ago that this was the best thing about her. The beaded border had come from a lace collar Ruth's gran had worn to her own wedding in 1961, and the scrollwork behind the hands was copied from the hem of that same collar, so the whole day kept folding back on itself like a letter read twice.

At the car, Ruth held out her arm and asked Maeve to check the healing for infection, the way a nurse might. Maeve pressed her thumb gently against the heart's outline. Ruth flinched, grinned, and slid her other hand into Maeve's coat pocket, where the thread ring had worked loose and was tangled in the lining. They untangled it together, Ruth's fingers warm and slightly sticky with ointment, and when the ring finally slipped free Maeve found it fitted her finger perfectly.