Black interlaced knot tattoo shaped like a heart on the inner forearm, shown in two side-by-side photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlaced heart knot on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a heart-shaped knot made of looping, interlaced black lines with a smaller inner knot at its centre. It is drawn in solid black linework with no shading, and the lines are of even weight. The left photograph shows it on a wrist with jeans and fingers at the edge of the frame, and the right shows the same design on a different arm in a closer crop.

Forearm Knot Heart Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cord had come out of the drawer twice already, and Nell still hadn't decided whether her grandmother would have approved of the second knot. Her mother's hands lay flat on the kitchen table between them, the way they went when she was trying not to tell someone what to do. Down the lane the harbour bell rang for the turning tide, and the guests had begun drifting toward the slipway in their good shoes.

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"Show me the heart again," Tom said. He had come up from the boats with salt still in his eyebrows and asked for nothing except that she not rush. Nell laid out the tarred line and worked it slowly: two loops for the families, one for the uncle the sea had kept, and a third that crossed back on itself so that no end ever showed. Her grandmother had called it the knot that never finds its way out. She had made Nell practise it on fence wire until her fingertips split.

They stood at the slipway with their wrists bound together, the way the old people had done it, and the water slapped the stones below them. Nell drew the last loop tight and it settled into the middle of the heart, a small knot nested inside a larger one, like a stone held in a palm. Tom laughed, a short surprised sound, and said it looked like the sort of thing a man would have to cut himself free of.

"Good," Nell said. "Then nobody will ever have to cut it." She tucked the spare end under the third loop, and the tide came in over the stones.