Small black and grey filigree heart tattoo on the back of a hand, close to the wrist, with pale pink nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Filigree heart on the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small heart made of ornate, scrolling filigree sits on the back of a hand near the wrist. The fine dark linework forms curled, lattice-like patterns with some areas of solid ink and some lighter, open sections. The ink is black and grey, and the composition is a close, slightly angled view of the hand against a soft-focus background.

Hand Heart Filigree Scrollwork Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that's the loose board Mrs Pardoe never mended, and sit where the draught can't reach you. Now, the silversmith in Penzance, Josiah Trenear, had a bench under the window where the gulls came to look at him. A fishmonger's widow asked him for a heart no bigger than a thumbnail, and she wanted it worked in filigree, every curl of it, so nobody could say it had been cast in a mould.

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He worked on it through the winter. Wire no thicker than a hair, twisted and coiled and soldered at each crossing, and where the scrolls met he left little open windows so the light could come through. His daughter Nell swept up the filings and asked him why he never finished it. He said a heart with no gaps in it is only a lump of silver, and she thought that was nonsense until the night the wire ran out.

The widow came for it in March and found one lattice gone slack, a curl missing near the top, where Nell had pulled a length of wire for a bird's nest she was building on the sill. Josiah could have melted the whole thing down and started again. Instead he sat with the widow until the kettle boiled dry and told her the open places were where her husband's laugh could still get in. She laughed so hard she had to hold the back of the chair.

She wore it on a ribbon for thirty years. Whenever I see one of those lace hearts, I think of that little gap at the top, and of Nell, who still keeps the bird's nest on her sill in Newlyn and says the gap is the only honest part of the thing.