Blue and black lettering tattoo of a filigree heart reading We're all mad here, placed on the upper arm.

Heart with lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large heart-shaped tattoo contains the words "We're all mad here" in bold, flowing black lettering. The heart's outline and surrounding scrollwork are rendered in teal to blue ink with fine swirling filigree details and a shaded gradient. The design is centred on a plain, lightly lit area of skin, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Heart Filigree Swirl Lettering Quote

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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 Vell wanted her heart painted on the back wall of the Co-operative, where the delivery lorries reversed and scraped the bricks every morning. I said the council would have my hide. She said the council had been mad since the war and a little more paint wouldn't tip it over. That was the first of her lines I kept, though I didn't know it yet.

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Her girl had been reading a book from the travelling library, the one with a grinning cat that vanishes and leaves its smile hanging in the air. The words Mrs Vell wanted came from it: we're all mad here. I sketched the heart with a compass and a length of butcher's string, then filled it with capitals I'd practised for weeks on the backs of seed packets. The black letters sat in the middle like a shout, and I wound filigree around the edges in blue enamel I mixed from the last of the Prussian stock, thinning it until it looked like river ice under a lamp.

When it was dry, she paid me in two half crowns and a jar of blackcurrant jam, then stood with her hands on her hips, squinting at the wall. She said it wanted one more thing. I thought she meant a date. Instead she asked me to leave a gap at the bottom point, just wide enough for a cat to sit, and I did.

Every evening after that, the low sun came through the bakery arch and the blue scrolls threw their shadows across the bricks, and the gap at the bottom stayed empty, waiting for whoever was mad enough to climb up and take it.