Flash sheet of five heart designs: a red winged heart, a black dotted heart, a heart with a ribbon banner, a scrolled heart and a floral heart with leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five heart flash designs on a sheet

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A white background shows five heart designs arranged across the sheet. The top left is a red heart with feathered black-and-grey wings, and the top right is a solid black heart filled with dots and teardrop shapes. The centre shows an outlined heart with a blank ribbon banner, the lower left a black linework heart with spiralling scrolls and dotted edges, and the lower right a floral heart with leaves, stems and small flowers.

Traditional Dotwork Botanical Heart Wing Ribbon Scroll Swirl Dot Leaves Flower Vine Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys Harker came back to the Marsh Lane reunion with a ribbon in her coat pocket and nothing written on it. It was the blank banner from the summer fair, the one the infants lost in the millrace the year before the school closed. Nobody in the hall remembered the banner, but they remembered her, and by the second bottle of wine they were asking where she had been all these years.

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She had been up in the hills past Wenlock, she said, mending hearts. Folk came to her with the ones they had broken themselves. She kept a red heart with feathered wings for those who needed to leave a place quickly, a black heart spotted all over with eyes for those who needed to see clearly, and a heart curled in double scrolls for couples who would not stop arguing about the kitchen. She took payment in windfall apples and one true sentence, written on a ribbon, which she then tied to the gatepost.

Terry Pell, who had once cheated at conkers and never owned up, bought her a whisky and asked for his own heart to be mended. Dilys handed him the ribbon and a stub of pencil. He wrote for a long time, then folded it small and gave it back to her unread. She tied it to the gatepost with the others, and the wind off the marsh set every one of them moving.

In the morning the gatepost at the end of Marsh Lane was dressed in ribbons, more than there had ever been children in that school, and every knot was pulled tight.