Black line art flash design of an eye with a heart-shaped pupil, a ribbon banner, roses and foliage, with mirrored lettering above, in a blackwork style.

Eye and heart design with roses and ribbon

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical black and white design centred on an open eye with a heart in the pupil, wrapped by a twisting ribbon banner. Two smaller eyes sit above, with roses, leaves and small floral sprigs filling the outer areas, and mirrored lettering reading WARM MY HEART runs across the top. The linework is bold with solid black fills and white highlights, and the composition is balanced around a central vertical axis.

Blackwork Botanical Eye Heart Ribbon Rose Leaves Lettering Banner Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Odile had painted shop glass for thirty-one years and had never once been asked to get the letters wrong. Mrs Tennant wanted them reversed, the way a word looks in a shaving mirror, so they would only make sense from the inside of the bakery. "Nobody out there needs to read it," she said, and laid two pound coins on the counter as if they were a deposit on a debt.

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Odile mixed gold size with a little black enamel and worked from the top down. The words went across first, WARM MY HEART, each letter leaning the wrong way like a sentence heard through a wall. Then the eye, open and wet-looking, with a small red heart set in its pupil. She wound a ribbon round it twice, lettering the banner into the shadowed gaps, and filled the corners with roses she had drawn a hundred times for christenings and funerals. Two smaller eyes watched from the top of the frame, because her father had taught her that a window without watchers was only a hole.

Three weeks later she walked past at dusk and stopped. From the pavement the glass was a jumble of gold scrawl, but a lamp burned at the back, and the pane turned into a mirror where the light caught it. Mrs Tennant sat alone at the counter with her spectacles pushed up, reading the words as they came back to her, moving her lips along with them. The eye above her head seemed to blink.

Odile did not knock. Some letters are meant for the one who stays behind the glass, and she had painted this one with that in mind.