Black traditional tattoo of a dagger piercing a heart with the words YOU ARE O.K. inside, on a forearm.

Dagger through a heart reading you are OK

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dagger with a banded hilt pierces a heart outlined in bold black linework, with a solid shadow along one side. The words YOU ARE O.K. are set in capital letters inside the heart, which is a plain white area of unshaded skin. The ink is solid black with no grey or colour, and the design sits centrally in a tight crop against a light background on the left.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Heart Text

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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

Brother Anselm has set the last of the vellum on your desk again, and you know he is waiting for the hour bell before he says anything. You have spent three nights on a single capital letter. The ink has gone thick in the cold and the gall smells sour in the scriptorium, so you warm the pot against your palm before you dip the quill.

Keep reading

The abbot wants a psalter ready for the travelling bishop before Candlemas. Yet on nearly every page there is a small mark in the margin that is not in the text: a dagger driven through a heart, its hilt bound in red thread, and inside the heart a line you were told never to copy. Nobody will admit to drawing them. Brother Anselm blames the novice who sharpens the pens, and the novice blames the mice.

On the last morning, with frost furring the cloister windows, you find the marks have multiplied, and you do not scrape them away. Instead you go over the heart in black, thick and certain, until the letters sit inside it square and steady, as if they had always belonged there. When the bishop's clerk comes to collect the book he frowns at the margins, then at you. You say nothing. He closes the psalter and fastens the clasp, and the words stay behind in the dark of the page, plain as bread: you are ok.