Turquoise line drawing of a dove with curling swirls and small hearts trailing from its tail, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dove with swirls and hearts

Colour · Flash

A single-weight turquoise outline of a dove in flight, facing right with a small eye marked in the head. Curling scroll shapes form the wing and tail, and a trail of small outlined hearts drifts to the left. The design is shown on a plain white background with even, open linework and no shading.

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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 closer, the lot of you, and mind the cat, it has been on the good cushion since midsummer. Now. The Kingdom of Velmary had a queen who could not sing, so she sent the heart of her realm out on paper instead. Every letter that left her palace was sealed with a tiny heart, and every heart was carried by a white dove called Ostrey, who had never once in her life landed on the same roof twice.

Keep reading

Ostrey flew from the salt marshes of the east to the river towns of Brack, over the mill at Tennow where the wheel turned slow, and back again before the bells of Sallowgate had finished ringing noon. She carried good news and bad, and she never complained of either, for a dove who complains is a dove who ends up in the soup.

One autumn a letter came to the palace with no heart at all on its seal. It had only a curl of blue ink in the corner, like the start of a question. The queen read it twice, folded it into her sleeve, and said nothing. The next morning the dove was gone and so was the letter, and the clerks swore that the swirls of mist above the gate had been spelling something out for hours.

Ask me what the letter said and I will tell you what my grandmother told me. It asked whether a queen was allowed to change her mind. The dove came home that winter with a ribbon of little hearts trailing behind her, one for every road she had flown, and the queen went out to the gate in her stockinged feet to count them.

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