Heart and world map chest tattoo with banners

Dotwork · Other · Mixed · Photo

A large ornate design sits across the centre of the torso, with a shaded heart containing a world map at its centre. Two ribbon banners carry the words friendship and loyalty, and an ornamental crown-like motif rises above the heart with dotted chains hanging below. The heart is rendered in stippled dotwork shading and fine linework in black and grey, while a coloured rose is partly visible at the left edge of the frame.

Dotwork Lettering Other Heart World map Banner Ribbon Script Crown Dotted chain Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They quarrelled about the sea for three days before anyone thought to ask the old map-maker what he had drawn. Teodor and Ansa had shared a bench in his workshop since they were boys, and a bowl of lentils every night, but neither would say which of them had spilled ink across the coast of Cyprus. Each swore it was the other. On the fourth morning the master set a copper plate on the table and told them to draw the world again, and to draw it so that neither could lift the other out of it.

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Teodor drew the lands first, carefully, the rivers running down to the sea like threads. Ansa drew the water, and then, when he was tired, he drew a small heart in the middle of the plate and began shading it with a fine point, tiny dots pressed one after another until the whole heart seemed to hold a grey light. Teodor laughed at him for wasting the morning on ornament. Ansa said a map without a heart was only a list of places.

The master did not look at the heart. He looked at the edge of the plate, where Ansa had strung a chain of small drops, and at the two curled scrolls that Teodor had added without being asked, one reading friendship and the other loyalty. He pressed the plate against his own chest, felt the warmth of it, and said that a thing is only truly shared when both hands have touched it in the dark.

Ansa found the stain on the coast of Cyprus was his own, and said so. Teodor found he had cut the words so deep that the copper had cracked beneath them. They buried neither the plate nor the quarrel. They hung it on the workshop wall, and the chain of drops kept trembling whenever the door opened.