Small heart tattoo with a blue diagonal stripe and black shading, with the word wife in black script beneath it, on an ankle.

Heart and wife script on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A small heart with a diagonal blue band across its centre, shaded in black and grey at the edges. The word wife is written in black script beneath the heart, with its final letter looping into a tail. The photo is a close view on a light skin tone against a pink textured blanket.

Lettering Ankle Heart Script Stripe

Find an artist for this

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 mortar came away under my thumbnail like wet sugar, and behind it the heart was still there, cut shallow into the sandstone of the chapel window at Harrowgate Keep. My father had sent me up the north tower with a bucket of lime and a flat trowel, and I had been cursing the damp for an hour before I found it.

Keep reading

The stripe across the heart was not carved. It had been painted, and the colour had survived four hundred winters in the lee of the wall because the rain never reached it. Dad knew the pigment at once. Ground lapis, he said, the kind a Lord paid a year's rent for. Beneath the heart, someone had scratched a word in a looping hand, and the last letter ran off into a tail as if the mason had not wanted to lift the point from the stone. The parish book said the Lord's steward was called Tobias Crane, and that he had gone to the wars and not come home. It said nothing about a wife.

I spent the afternoon with the ledgers from the estate office, which smelled of mice and vinegar. In the spring of the year Crane left, there was an entry for a single ounce of blue, bought on credit from a pedlar on the Scarborough road, and a second entry, crossed through, that read only: paid in full, with thanks. Nobody had written down who paid.

When the light went I climbed back up and held the lamp to the window. The stripe was still bright enough to read. I packed the lime away and left the heart exposed to the weather, because whoever had painted it had wanted it seen, and I could not see why I should be the one to hide it.