Black line drawing of a tattoo design with two hearts edged in rope, swirls, two roses, leaves and beaded chains, in a neo-traditional style.

Hearts, roses and beads line drawing

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil or ink line drawing of a tattoo design showing two overlapping hearts with rope-twist outlines, one filled with swirling scrolls and dots. Two roses with shaded petals, leaves and looping beaded chains surround the hearts, with a tapering leaf or feather shape sweeping along the left and right edges. The linework is clean and uniform on a plain off-white background, with no colour.

Neo-trad Heart Rose Rope Swirl Leaf Bead Chain

Find an artist for this

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 rope had come off a fishing boat before the wedding, and Aunt Sylvie insisted on twisting it around the lockets herself, sitting on the back step of the chandlery with her tongue between her teeth. "Two strands, never three," she said. "Three is for funerals and bad marriages." I told her she had the wrong end of the rope for a bride's family, and she swatted me with the coil.

Keep reading

The lockets were her mother's. One had a dent where somebody dropped it on the quay in 1957, and the other she had bought from a stall in Whitby for the price of a bag of chips. Sylvie hammered the dent out of the first with the handle of a teaspoon and scratched curls into the second with a nail file until they matched, one swirl for every year the men in our family had gone out and come back. She counted them twice, got a different number each time, and laughed at herself.

On the day, glass beads from a jar she had been saving since the war ran along the pew ends like a second necklace. The bride found the roses in the florist's buckets and cut the thorns off with kitchen scissors, complaining the whole time. Nobody looked closely at the lockets until the vicar held them up and the light from the high window caught the scrolls.

Afterwards Sylvie sat in the wreck of the marquee with one shoe off, turning the plain heart over in her fingers. "They'll outlast the lot of us," she said, not unkindly. "That's what rope is for."