Black fine line tattoo of a heart built from fingerprint-like swirls, with 'est.' and 9·11·10 in script and numerals beside it, on a forearm.

Fingerprint heart with date on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A heart outline is filled with fine, swirling black lines that resemble a fingerprint pattern, with light shading giving it depth. Small script reading 'est.' sits above the heart, and the numerals 9·11·10 run along its lower right edge. The piece is in black ink on pale skin, centred in a close, straight-on crop with a plain background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Heart Fingerprint Date Script Number

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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

Dear Nell, the printer in the back room has finally given up, so I am writing this by hand on the good paper your mother left in the drawer. You will laugh, but I have spent most of Tuesday with my thumbs in a saucer of ink. Mr Okafor at the bindery wanted a print from every apprentice for the guild register, and when it came to mine he squinted at the whorls and said they were the prints of a man who would never stop tinkering.

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The register is a black cloth ledger with its spine held together by tape and prayer. Every page has a pressed thumb beside a name and a date. Mr Okafor showed me how to roll the thumb edge to edge so the ridges come out clean, and how to keep the ink off the margins, which I did not manage. He tapped a line at the top of the first page where someone had written est. in faded brown and said the workshop had opened on a Thursday in November, and everyone who joined afterwards had to leave a print on the day they started.

Then I turned to the page for the ninth of November, the day you were born, and found a thumb I did not expect. It was your father's, set down in his careful way beside a name I had never heard him mention. He had worked there for one winter before he met your mother. I pressed my own thumb beside his, and the two sets of lines ran almost parallel, like furrows seen from a train window.

I am enclosing a copy of that page, folded small inside this envelope. Come on Saturday and roll your thumb with me. We will get ink on the tablecloth and make the mess your mother always hated, and then we will leave our prints where they belong.