Blackwork tattoo on a forearm showing a solid black ink splash with dripping lines and a heart-shaped area of bare skin at its centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart in a black ink blot on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black ink splatter forms a rounded blot on the arm, with a heart-shaped gap of untattooed skin at the centre. Thin black drips run downwards from the blot, and fine spatter spreads outwards at its edges. The image is entirely black ink against skin tones and a pale background, with a shadow falling across the wall on the right.

Blackwork Forearm Heart Splatter Drip

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 stencil card had been my father's. He cut it the winter he lost the feeling in his left hand, and by the time it came to me the oiled edges had gone stiff as old boot leather. I was marking crates for the Hull boats that Tuesday, forty by ten o'clock, the brush loaded so heavy with black that it dripped if you looked at it hard. Mr Rennick came down the yard with his watch open in his palm and said the Ashby order had to be on the quay by noon, so I lifted the pot too quick.

Keep reading

The ink went over the card in one slow tongue, down the wood, over the lip of the bench and onto the planks where it spattered like a dropped hat. I stood there with the brush in the air. The heart in the card was the only thing it had missed. Father used to say a stencil is nothing but the bits you choose not to print, and that the bit you cut out is the bit people remember. I never believed him. I thought it was just a shape that fitted the template.

Rennick saw the mess and swore, then saw my face and stopped. He took the card to the window, and the light came through the clean gap like a coin on a wet step. "Print it again," he said. "Leave the blot on the crate. The buyers will think it's a maker's mark." So we did. Forty crates went to Hull that week, each with a black splash running down its side and a pale heart at the centre, and nobody on the docks ever asked what it meant.

Father died in the spring. I still have the card, black to the edges now, and when the light is low I hold it against the window and watch the little hole fill up with the afternoon.