Black ink line drawing of a heart with a cross inside it on a white background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart with cross line design

Black and grey · Flash

A single heart outline drawn in bold black strokes, with a thick, tapering stroke along the left side and a lighter line on the right. A simple cross sits inside the heart, its upright crossing a short horizontal bar. The image is flat black on white with no shading, and the heart is centred in the frame.

Heart Cross

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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 mule has stopped again at the lip of Hollin Gap, planting its hooves the way it does when it has decided the weather is someone else's business. You stamp the feeling back into your feet and wait for the wind to tear a hole in the cloud, which it does, briefly, showing the valley below like a dropped handkerchief of grey.

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The waymark stands where the path forks, a squared slab of millstone grit gone yellow with lichen on its windward side. Someone cut a heart into its face long ago. The left curve is deep and heavy, chiselled with a steady hand and then tapered as the blade skated off the grain, while the right curve is a thin scratch that nearly gives up before its point. Inside it sits a single upright and a shorter bar, the bar set a little high, as if the second cutter had climbed up in a hurry and was too cold to measure.

The innkeeper at Carrow told you the cross marked the place where a couple had parted, one going down to the mills and the other staying with the flock. He told it with the relish of a man who had never walked that path in January. But the crossbar tells another story. It is newer, its edges sharper, and the chisel marks run the wrong way, as though the stone had been turned to face the other road.

You pull off a glove and press your palm over the heart. Snow drifts across the slab and fills the hollow of the left curve, but the cross stays clear, the way a thing does when someone has kept coming back to tend it. The mule shifts its weight. You take the right-hand fork, where the thin line runs, and leave the deep one to the weather.