Black line drawing of a heart enclosing the words Adventure is where your heart is, with a cactus, mountains, palm tree, sailboat, pine trees and a sun, as a tattoo design.

Heart with adventure lettering and landscape

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A heart outline frames the script phrase "Adventure is where your heart is" in bold hand-lettered linework. Inside the heart are a cactus, a palm tree, layered mountains, a rising sun, pine trees and a small sailboat on wavy water. The design is drawn in black ink on a cream background with a speckled texture, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Heart Lettering Cactus Mountain Palm tree Sailboat Pine tree Sun Wave

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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

Don't you touch that tin, Danny, not till I've told you where the heart came from. Your great-uncle Joe drew it on the back of a feed sack the winter of 1931, sat right where you're sitting with his boots steaming by the range.

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He'd crossed the Sahara road with a camel man called Hassan, then the Atlas, then shipped out of Liverpool on a coal boat that smelled of cats. Every place he'd been got a little thing in the heart. A cactus for the dust that stayed in his teeth. Palms for a well at Siwa where he drank the sweetest water he ever tasted. Pines for the Scottish glen where he first went homesick. Mountains, a sun coming up over them, and a sailboat at the bottom sitting on the waves like it had nowhere to be.

He never lettered the words himself. Mrs Pryce from the chapel did them, the same tall loops she used on the hymn boards, and she said the heart was a fib because a man can't be in two places at once. Joe just laughed and said the heart was the only thing on earth that could be in every place at once, which was exactly why it ached.

He sailed again in '36 and that sack was the last thing he sent home. The letter that came back from Valparaiso had a red stamp on it, return to sender, and I never knew what it was he'd meant to say. Every spring I keep the sheet flat in the tin and trace the little boat with one finger. Go on, Danny. Trace it. It isn't going anywhere, and that's the trick of it.