Black geometric tattoo of a heart filled with tribal bands and chevrons, placed on the upper arm of a woman in a black top.

Heart with tribal pattern on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black heart sits on the outer upper arm, filled with horizontal bands of tribal-style zigzags, chevrons, dots and fine lines. The linework is crisp and the design is entirely black ink with no shading or grey wash. The heart is centred on the arm against a plain white background, with the wearer's face outside the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Heart Tribal pattern Chevron Zigzag Stripe Dot

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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 lino block had been wrapped in a tea towel on the top shelf since Dad's hands gave out, and at ten past eleven on a Tuesday I unwrapped it under the strip light while the last tram rattled past the print room window. The heart was still there, cut into the rubber with a V gouge and pressed into a stiff black outline. Someone from the bridal shop on Kirkgate wanted forty metres of it by Friday, and Dad was the only one who had ever cut the pattern properly.

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He had filled the heart in bands. Zigzags went top and bottom, chevrons ran through the middle, and between them were rows of tiny dots, each one a single stab of the tool. He always cut the centre band twice as deep so the ink would sit there thick and dark when the roller went over. I had watched him do it a hundred times from the stool by the sink, eating crisps out of the bag and pretending I wasn't listening to the scrape and tick of the blade.

When I pulled the first proof, the top half came off perfectly. The bottom band was blank. The dots had never been cut, just pencilled in faintly, as if he had meant to come back to them after the Christmas run and simply hadn't. I sat there with the proof drying on the bench and the radiators knocking, and I thought about how many things he had left half finished.

So I finished it myself. I worked until the building went grey at the edges, cutting each dot with the small gouge, brushing the crumbs of rubber into my palm. When I inked the block and pressed it down, the heart came up black and whole, every line sharp, the way it used to look in his hand. I hung the sheet on the drying line by the window and left it there, glistening, for the morning shift to find.