Traditional style tattoo of a red heart with a black arrow through it and the word MYSELF inside, placed on the thigh beside roses and a black ornamental design.

Heart with arrow reading MYSELF on a leg

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A red heart with bold black outlines and a black arrow piercing it from the upper right, with the word MYSELF written in black capitals across the centre. Surrounding it are a black ornamental scroll at the top left, a red and pink rose at the top right and a rose set in a ring at the right edge. The shading is soft and the colours are red, pink, green and yellow on pale skin, photographed close up against a grey background.

Traditional Thigh Heart Arrow Word Rose Ornament Scroll

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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

Mrs Adeyemi came into the shop on a Tuesday with a drawing on the back of a chip paper: one heart, red as a pillar box, an arrow slipping in from the top right corner, and across the middle, in capitals, MYSELF. "Can you do that?" she asked. I said we did names, dates and the occasional anchor, and I wasn't sure about confessions. She said she'd never once put her own name on a thing she owned, and she didn't intend to start with a sign.

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I have been lettering on the Margate front since I was sixteen, and the thing about a word is that it must sit straight. I snapped a chalk line, pulled the scroll from a 1930s sample book my father kept in the drawer under the till, and ruled the rose ring with a compass that had lost a leg. The green took three coats because the sea air kept lifting it. She watched from a stool with her handbag clamped on her knees and said nothing for an hour, which is longer than most customers manage.

The tearoom she was opening was going to be hers alone, she told me, no partner, no cousin with opinions about scones. When I asked why the arrow, she shrugged and said somebody had to take the first shot, and it might as well be the one who knew where she'd be standing.

She paid in coppers from a purse shaped like a fish, asked me to paint the word bigger, and then stood on the pavement with the wet gloss catching the light. A gull landed on the rail above the door and looked down at the heart as if it had been asked for its opinion. "Well," she said, "that's the first thing I've ordered that I'll have to live with."