Black line drawing of a solid heart entwined with looping ribbon lines and small dots, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Heart and swirling ribbon design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black heart sits at the centre of a flowing design made of looping ribbon-like lines that wind up and down the page. Small dots trail from the upper and lower ends of the ribbon. The image uses bold black linework and a filled heart shape on a plain off-white background, with no colour.

Heart Ribbon Swirl Dot Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thread had been red once, but the pass had weathered it to the colour of old brick, and Marta Oss still tied it to the cairn each spring before the snow came off the north face. Her father had done the same, and his mother before him, though nobody in the valley could say why a ribbon should keep a road open. The carters only knew that the wind came over the saddle in a loop, and that a man who tied nothing to the stones would be found in May with his mules still roped together.

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One winter a boy from the lower farms came up the track with a heart cut from tin on a string around his neck. He wanted to cross to his sweetheart's people on the far side before the thaw, and he laughed at the ribbon. Marta let him go on without it. She watched him climb the first switchback, then the second, the dark shape of him bending into the wind, and then she watched the snow fill his tracks until they were only the wind writing over the place where he had been.

He came back in April, grey-faced, with a strip of cloth knotted round his wrist. He had gone over the top, he said, and the wind had turned him round three times, the way it turns a rope, and set him down facing home. He had not wanted to leave her, he told her. He had only been looking for the right road.

Marta cut a length from the old red and tied it to the cairn beside the boy's blue one. The loops lifted and fell, and the tin heart knocked softly against the stone.