Black linework drawing of an ornate heart locket with a bow, wings, pearl strands and gemstone drops, shown twice on one sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart locket with bow and pearls design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two near-identical drawings of a tattoo design on a pale sheet. The central motif is a heart-shaped locket with a filigree border and a smaller gem-cut heart inside, topped by a bow and flanked by scrolling ribbons and wings. Strands of beads hang from both sides, with faceted gemstone drops at the ends.

Heart Bow Pearl Gemstone Wing Ribbon Scrollwork

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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 locket came across my counter on a wet Tuesday in February, wrapped in a handkerchief that smelled of violets and cheap tobacco. Mrs Ada Pardoe would not say whose it was. She wanted four pounds on it and gave her word she would redeem it by Michaelmas, and in my trade a widow's word weighs more than most people's silver. I turned it over under the lamp. A filigree heart, its edges worked so fine they looked like frost on a window, sat under a silk bow with ribbons unspooling from either side like something let go of in a hurry. Strings of seed pearls ran down to faceted drops of garnet, and inside the larger heart sat a smaller one, cut clean and dark as a drop of wine.

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I have priced a thousand pieces across that counter, but I never learned to hurry past the good ones. I opened the back with my thinnest blade and found, pressed flat against the hinge, a pawn ticket from 1887 with the shop's old stamp on it, and on its reverse two drawings in grey pencil of this same design, one a little bolder than the other. Someone had written beneath them, Mrs P, for the day. I asked Mrs Pardoe about it when she came back to sign the book. She folded her gloves very carefully and said her mother had bought the drawing from a silversmith in Vyse Street who was never paid, and that the locket had been made from the second copy because the first had gone to a girl who died before her wedding.

Michaelmas came and went. Nobody redeemed it. I did not sell it either. I put the locket in the safe with the 1887 ticket and kept the two pencil drawings, which I pinned above the bench where the afternoon light from Warstone Lane falls across them. Two hearts, almost the same, drawn by a man who never got his money.