Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand-drawn heart outline

Black and grey · Flash

A single heart shape drawn as an open outline in thick black ink, with one side tapering to a point at the top centre dip. The linework is loose and varies in width, with a heavier stroke on the left side and a thinner stroke on the right. The image is in black ink only on a plain white background with no shading or other elements.

Heart

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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

You stand third from the end of the covered row at Millgate market, where the awning sags and gathers rain in a pocket above the fishmonger's crates. Your biro skips across the back of a price card, the ink thin where the damp has got into the paper. Across the aisle, Mrs Okonedo is calling out prices for tangerines as if the weather owes her money, and nobody is buying.

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Dell comes down the row at twenty to four with her hood up and a carrier bag of soggy bread. She doesn't look at your card. She looks at the bare hook where your sign used to hang, the one the gust took on Tuesday, and says nobody sells anything in the rain except umbrellas and regret. You laugh, because it is the first thing anyone has said to you since dawn that sounded like it was meant.

She asks what you're drawing. You say it's nothing, just a shape, the kind your hand makes when your head is elsewhere. You turn the card over so she can see. The left side is heavy, pressed hard into the card the way you draw when you are cross with the paper. The right side is thin, almost a rumour. At the top the two lines meet and don't quite close, a small dip where the pen lifted and never came back down.

Dell takes the biro from you, studies the card, and changes nothing. She tucks it under the bread. "Leave it open," she says. "Closing things is what people do when they want the rain to stop." Then she walks out into the wet, and the card stays on the crate, the ink running slowly down the heavy side toward the gap at the bottom where the point should be.