Small red cross-stitch style heart tattoo on the inner wrist, worn beside a red fabric bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross-stitch heart on the inner wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small heart is built from red X-shaped stitches in a grid, resembling embroidery. The lines are crisp and the ink is a single shade of red, set against pale skin. The heart sits centrally on the inner wrist, with a red woven bracelet with green and red badges below it and a grey paved surface in the background.

Forearm Heart

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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

The sacks came back from the pickers' yard every September with their seams split, and it was my job to close them before the Bramleys went to market. My mother had taught me to mend with a bodkin and waxed thread at the kitchen table in Ashford, and by twelve I could close a hessian tear faster than Dad could find his spectacles. Old Mr Pettit paid me in windfalls and rough words, and that suited me well enough.

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The summer Ruth Kemp came to work the grading tables, she brought a tin of unbleached cotton and a stack of tea towels she had embroidered for her hope chest. She stitched crosses on everything in one shade of red, row after row, until a plain cloth looked as if it had been woven somewhere far off. I told her a cross-stitch heart would never hold a sack seam. She laughed and said it was never meant to hold anything.

On the last Friday of August the wasps got into the cider press and the yard went quiet, and Ruth pinned a square of cloth to the cuff of my old work glove. Look, she said, and drew the needle through the air in a heart's shape. It took her eleven minutes to stitch it. I counted, because I had nothing else to do with my hands. I never asked why she chose a heart. I think it was the only shape she trusted to stay still.

Ruth left for Canterbury in October and never sent a letter, but the sacks still arrive each September, and I still close them with a bodkin and red thread. Whenever I turn that glove over, I find the small grid of crosses on its cuff and think how many stitches it takes to make something look as though it was always there.