Two traditional colour tattoos on a calf: a blue heart reading eat me beside a pink bottle reading drink me, both with flowers and leaves.

Eat me heart and drink me bottle on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

The photograph is split into two panels showing the same calf with a tattoo on each side. The left panel has a blue heart with a white dotted border and the words eat me in script, with a pink flower and green leaves. The right panel shows a pink bottle with a blue ribbon, a tag reading drink me, and a blue flower with leaves, all in bold outlines with solid colour fills and soft purple shading behind.

Traditional Calf Heart Flower Bottle Ribbon Leaves Script

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

The snow had closed the Hollin Pass by noon, and the only shelter left was Mrs Abernethy's toll house, a stone box with one lamp and a cupboard full of jars. I was counting coins into her palm for the mule when she set a tin heart on the table. Its lid was blue enamel, scalloped with white dots, and inside lay a sugared square with two words pressed into it in a neat hand: eat me.

Keep reading

"It is for the cold," she said, "not for the hungry. Take half and the road will lengthen. Take the rest and it will shorten again." I had no wish to test her, but I was hungry enough to be curious. I broke off a corner and the stone wall beside the hearth drew away from my eyes like a curtain. The lamp became a moon. When I looked for the mule it was the size of a thimble, bleating in protest from the flat of my hand.

She did not laugh. She took down a rose-pink bottle from the sill, its glass stopper like a little ball, a blue ribbon knotted round the neck and a paper tag swinging from it. The tag said drink me in faded ink. I drank, and the room came back to its proper size, a little too quickly, so that I sat down hard on the flagstones.

When the thaw opened the pass three days later, I rode out on a mule that was exactly as large as it had been, and I carried the blue tin in my coat. Mrs Abernethy had charged me one shilling for the night. I still have the tag. It is the only thing I own that has never once told me a lie.