Black and grey flash design of an interlocking heart and six-pointed star within a circle, framed by ornate filigree scrollwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and hexagram ornamental design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design centred on a circle containing an interlocking heart shape and a six-pointed star, drawn as solid white lines over a dark patterned background. The circle is surrounded by dense filigree scrollwork with fleur-like terminals extending left, right, up and down. The image is a flat monochrome drawing with no skin, shading or background detail beyond the ornament.

Geometric Heart Star Circle Filigree Ornament Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nineteen the winter the Marguerite is hauled out at Brentford, and the old boatwoman, Vi Harrod, hands you a brush loaded with lamp black and tells you to stop holding it like a pen. Her cabin side is a cracked panel of roses and castles gone grey with weather. She wants the star on the door, and she wants the heart inside it, because her husband had both painted on his first boat and she has never forgiven the river for taking him.

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You spend a fortnight on the scrollwork first, because Vi says the circle is easy and the flourishes are where people show they care. You work the fleur ends outward from a centre pricked with a compass point, and the filigree grows until your wrists ache. The hexagram is two triangles locked like fingers. The heart is the hard part: it has to loop through the star without touching it, and every time you try, the point bleeds into the outline and Vi makes you scrape it back with a razor.

On the last night the frost comes down on the cut and the stove ticks. You finish the white lines with a rigger's brush, leaving the dark ground showing through the lace as Vi insisted. She looks for a long time, then takes your hand, the one with ink in its creases, and says the star is for pointing you home and the heart is for knowing where home is. She goes to bed without another word.

In the morning the cabin door stands open. Her tea is still warm on the hob, and the brush you used is laid across the sill, washed and dry. You paint your own name in small letters under the heart, then think better of it and scrape it off with the razor, leaving only the faint outline of where it was.