Traditional style tattoo of a man and a woman embracing in front of a red heart with blue-grey flowers, shown on skin in three repeated panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Couple embracing in a red heart

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold traditional style tattoo shows a man and a woman embracing in front of a large red heart with a dark ornate border. Thick black outlines define the figures, with solid fills and soft grey shading on the faces and the man's sleeve-like arm patterning, and two blue-grey flowers sit at the upper corners. The image repeats the same design across three side-by-side panels, with tattooed skin and other ink visible at the edges.

Traditional Other Couple Man Woman Embrace Heart Flower

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

Ned Callow swore the ink on his forearm would be the only honest thing he owned by spring. The Dutchman who worked above the chandler's on Wick Street had lost the sight in one eye that winter, so Ned had him tattoo the same two faces three times over, one panel after another, as though a single heart might not hold his nerve. I held the lamp. He wanted Marit's hair black as the harbour at midnight and her lips the colour the dockers called port-wine, and he would not let the Dutchman soften a single line.

Keep reading

Marit had sailed out of Saltmere on the Ondine three winters before, bound for the sugar ports, and the town had stopped expecting her back. Ned walked the breakwater each evening with a tin of tobacco and a letter folded so often it had gone soft as cloth. The blue-grey flowers in the corners were his mother's idea. She said they were the colour of the squall that had taken the Ondine's sister ship off the Skerries, and that a man should carry something from weather he had survived.

In April the Ondine came round the point with a fresh coat of paint on her rail and only one passenger on the gangway, and it was not Marit. It was her sister Sabine, carrying a sealed oilcloth parcel that smelt of creosote and salt. Inside were a pair of gloves, a pocket watch stopped at a quarter past four, and a note in a hand Ned knew better than his own.

He read it standing on the wet stones, then read it again. When he finally rolled his sleeve back down over the three red hearts, he did not look at the faces. He looked at the watch, and he began to walk towards the light at the end of the breakwater, counting his steps the way Marit always had.