Black thread embroidery in a wooden hoop of a tattoo-style hand holding a heart with a SOULMATE banner, a chain and a decorated cuff.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Embroidered hand holding a heart banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline embroidery on cream linen shows a hand with fingers curled around a chain that hangs from a heart-shaped banner reading SOULMATE, with a small key drawn across the heart. A decorated cuff with hearts and leaf-like motifs sits at the wrist, end of the chain. The fine stitched line work is uniform, the design is centred in the hoop, and the piece sits on a rustic wooden background with a twine loop and a pair of scissors beside it.

Traditional Hand Heart Banner Chain Cuff Key

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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

Mind the links, they're still warm from the fire. Sit yourself down on that nail keg and I'll tell you how the chain came to be made, because nobody believes the chain part without the rest of it.

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My father made chain in a shed behind the Cross Keys in Cradley Heath, the year the cutlers came out on strike. A man walked in one wet Tuesday with a tin heart on a ribbon, a little key soldered across the front and the word SOULMATE punched in letters so crooked you could tell he'd done them himself with a nail. He wanted a chain long enough to reach from his wrist to the heart, and a cuff that would lock, and he wanted it by morning. My father said three days. The man said he had until Saturday and not a minute past.

They made it in the end, a double run of iron, every ring hammered shut by hand, and the cuff they forged from a bent horseshoe, stamped all over with hearts and little leaves so it looked like a sweetheart's glove. The key fitted. The man came back the Friday, paid in silver, and went off with the heart swinging at his knee.

What my father never told the cutlers was that the key was never turned. The man came back the next winter with the cuff hanging loose and asked for it to be struck off. He said the lock had been for the other one, and she had gone to Birmingham with the key in her pocket. My father cut the links with the big shears on the bench, and he kept the heart. Here, have a look. Still bright, that tin. Nobody's ever managed to rust it.