Black ink line drawing of a heart built from flowers, leaves, swirls and cursive lettering, a flash-style design with no placement on skin.

Heart made of flowers and swirls in pen

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn black ink design arranges flowers, leaves, butterflies, swirling tendrils and script lettering into the outline of a heart. The linework is fine and mostly even, with hatched and dotted details inside the petals and bold strokes in the lettering. The drawing is in black ink on white paper and is centred on the page with generous margins.

Heart Flower Leaves Butterfly Swirl Script Lettering Arrow Tulip Floral

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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

By the third week of the thaw, the courtyard of Ostrey Keep had given up pretending it was a garden. Frost still lay in the cracks between the flagstones, and you knelt among them with a trowel the castle smith had made you from a cracked horseshoe, digging up nothing but last year's bindweed. The king's clerk walked past twice, counting the arches. Nobody counted the flowers, which was why you grew them there.

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The letter came folded inside a bulb's paper wrapper, the only way anything reached you now. It was from the mountain village of Hollin, where the one person you had ever loved had gone to mend the mill wheel and not come back. The hand was careless, the ink smudged where a thumb had rested. It said only: to remain. Two words, with a little curl of a tendril drawn beneath, as if the writer had run out of patience and turned to decoration instead.

So you did what the kingdom had never allowed a gardener to do. You planted a heart. You laid out the beds in its shape, butterflies where the lobes met, tulips pressed into the lower point, and the wild daisies that grew along the walls around the lettering. Each evening you carried water up from the well, and each morning the cold had not undone a single petal.

By midsummer the clerk returned, stopped at the gate, and stood a long while with his ledger shut. Then he asked what the flowers were for. You told him the truth, that you had been waiting for a reply, and that a heart set in the earth could be read from the highest tower. He went away without writing anything down. The next week a rider came down from Hollin with a bundle of seed packets tied in string, and the first thing he asked was where the gate to the courtyard was kept.