Black ink line drawing of a cracked heart wrapped in a bandage, with a plaster, stitches, a rose and leaves, in a traditional flash style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cracked heart with rose and bandage

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a heart split down the middle, bound with a wrapped bandage and held together with stitches, with a plaster on the upper left lobe. A rose with leaves sits behind the heart on the left and right, and the leaves extend along the lower edge. The bold dark outlines use hatched lines for shading and the design is rendered in black ink on cream paper, with no colour.

Traditional Heart Stitches Rose Leaves

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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

Sit yourself down on that upturned bucket, Tom, and mind the slugs. You want the story of the Harrowgate rose? Right then. Old Mrs Pellow had it climbing the vicarage wall, and every winter she went at it with her secateurs like a surgeon at a ward round. One February the frost came down hard overnight and split the main stem clean along its length, and the sap ran out grey as candle wax.

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Most gardeners would have dug it out and been done with it. Not Mrs Pellow. She fetched the linen tablecloth off her mother's dresser, the one with the scorched corner, and tore it into strips. She bound the stem round and round until it looked like a mummy in a picture book. Then she took a darning needle and a skein of green wool and stitched the split bark shut, three stitches a side, pulling each one snug. Last of all she dabbed the wound with a sticking plaster from the tin where she kept them for her own knuckles, the ones the thorns never let heal.

Everyone said it would be dead by June. It wasn't. In May a single bud pushed out of the bandaged stretch, pale as a cracked saucer, and it opened on the first warm morning. The vicar brought his wife round to see it, and Mrs Pellow only nodded and went back to her weeding.

That rose is still on the wall, Tom. Look close at the bark and you'll find the little green knots where she sewed it, and that's the bit that flowers hardest every summer. Now mind your feet on the gravel, the gate's stiff.