Black line drawing of the word family in flowing script inside a heart outline with looped swashes, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Family script inside a looping heart outline

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design is a single black line drawing of a heart outline with a looping swash at the top. The word family is written in cursive script across the centre, with its letters extended into the heart's lower point. It is drawn in solid black linework on a white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Heart Family Script Swirl Outline

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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

The snow reached the second step of the porch by four o'clock, and by six the lane had vanished, so you stopped pretending the coach would come. Mrs Ashdown's inn at Black Scar had eleven rooms and, tonight, four guests who had not planned to be there: a vicar's widow, two lorry drivers from Carlisle, and a boy of about nine who would not say who he was travelling with.

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You find him in the back kitchen with the old guest book open on the flour bin. Someone long ago drew a heart in its margin, a single looping line that swells at the top, and inside it the word family runs down the middle, the final y dragging its tail into the point at the bottom. "My nan did that," he says, tracing it with a floury finger. "She said it was so you could read it upside down too."

You ask where his nan is. He shrugs and says she is at the other end of the valley, or she was this morning. The phone lines went down at noon, so nobody can check. Mrs Ashdown comes in with a tray of cocoa and says the book has lived in the cupboard since her mother's day, and that every landlady since has added one name each winter, in whatever hand she had, until nobody could tell whose handwriting was whose.

Near midnight the boy turns to the first clean page and writes his name at the point of the heart, then spins the book round so you can read it. Beneath his, where the loop curls back on itself, he has left a gap about the size of your name. He waits, pen held out across the flour, while the snow keeps falling on the lane.