Red heart and black and grey stencil-style figure tattooed on a forearm, beside a printed reference design of the same motif.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and figure stencil on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey stencil-style figure sits below a red heart on the inside of a forearm. The figure has a rounded head and simple shaded body, with solid fills and crisp edges. A printed reference sheet of the same design is held beside the arm, showing the original artwork with a pink heart on a plain background.

Forearm Heart Figure Animal Stencil

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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 council van came with its pressure washer at seven, so I went out at four with my stencil card rolled inside my coat. Nobody on Hollin Street had asked for a bear on the side of the Co-op wall, and nobody had asked me to paint one, but Mrs Okafor's grandson had cried over his bike after the bin lorry flattened it, and I thought a small thing on a big wall might be worth a week of the hose.

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The rain came sideways off the car park. I cut the card on the bonnet of my Corsa with a craft knife that kept slipping, then held it flat to the brick while my fingers went white. The bear was simple: a round head, a heavy coat, a little tin of paint held against its chest like a lunch box. Above it I wanted a heart, not stencilled but sprayed loose, so the red ran a bit at the bottom where the can had sat too long. I did that part fast, before the cold could get into my wrist.

A woman pushed a pram past and stopped. She looked at the bear for a long time and said it looked lonely. I said maybe it was waiting for someone to come and collect it. She laughed and said that was the kind of thing you said to a child, and I said I had been a child once, which she did not need to know.

The van came at seven as promised. By eight the wall was grey and wet and clean, and the bear had gone with the rest of the grime down the drain. The heart had not. It sat up high on the render where the water could not get a proper grip, faint and pink now, the colour of something left out in the sun, and it kept on looking down at the empty patch as though it had been left there on purpose.