Traditional style tattoo of a red heart with a white banner reading MOM, flanked by orange flowers and green leaves, on the upper arm near the shoulder.

Heart banner and flowers on a shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A red heart with a white banner across its centre reads MOM in bold green-filled lettering, outlined in black. Two orange five-petalled flowers with red centres and green leaves sit at the left and lower right, with black scrolling vines filling the upper right. The bold black outlines and solid colour fills are typical of traditional American tattooing, and the design is shown in close focus on the shoulder and upper arm.

Traditional Shoulder Heart Banner Mom Flower Leaves Vine Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the rain's come in sideways and the big top has nothing left to hold but water. Let me tell you about the last season of Pemberton's Grand Travelling Menagerie, when it still had a lion that answered to its name. Nobody had money for sentiment that year. So when Ada Lusk, who had mended every seam of that canvas since before the war, sat down on the step of her wagon with a needle and a scrap of red velvet, the strongmen laughed at her.

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She cut the velvet into a heart, stitched a white silk banner across its middle, and worked the letters in green thread, one by one, pulling each stitch tight enough to bite. Then she sewed two orange flowers with red eyes and a tangle of black vine curling off the top, as if it meant to climb out. I was the clown with the cracked white face, twelve years old and thinking every drawing was a joke. "What's that for?" I asked. "For whoever keeps the tent up when nobody's paying," she said, and bit off the thread.

The circus folded in October. The lion went to a zoo in Bristol, the bearded lady opened a tea shop in Margate, and I sold dishcloths from a trestle in Leeds for thirty years. I never threw the heart away. It went through every coat and every pocket I owned, and the orange flowers faded to the colour of weak tea.

Last spring a girl at my stall asked what the green letters said. I had to clear my throat before I could tell her it was a name, and then I told her about a woman on a wagon step, and how the thread had outlasted the lion, the tent and the tea shop. The girl held the heart up to the grey light. "They're still bright," she said, and I found I had nothing to add.