Black fine line tattoo of a lace-patterned heart with hanging chains and a small anchor, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace heart with hanging chains on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A lace-patterned heart with a bird-like flourish on its upper right sits above several fine chains that hang down the leg. The chains end in small drops and an anchor at the bottom. The linework is thin and black, with no shading or colour, and the design is centred on the calf against a dark background.

Fine line Calf Heart Lace Chain Anchor Pendant Bird

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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

Rain had been coming off the canvas awnings of Sneinton Market since dawn, and Maud Ferris had given up trying to keep her pattern sheets dry. She pinned the last of them under a jar of buttons and watched the corner with the bird curl at its edges. The sheet was drawn in iron-gall ink, a heart worked in bobbin lace, with a wren perched on its shoulder where the pattern had been left open for a name.

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Her grandmother had sold lace from this same stall for forty years, and the heart was the only pattern she never let anyone copy. Maud had taken it down from the attic in a biscuit tin, a brass anchor clipped to the ribbon that tied it. Nobody in the family knew whose anchor it was. The chains had been added later, in a different hand, fine as hair, looping down the margin and ending in little drops and the anchor again.

A young man from the wharf office came by at noon in a waxed coat and asked whether the stall still took commissions. He wanted something to hang over a door. Maud looked at the chains and said the heart was not for sale, but he could have the wren if he could tell her where the chains went. He turned the sheet to the grey light and traced the drops with a wet finger. "They go down to the water," he said, and she let him take the tin.

By dusk the rain had stopped and the awnings dripped in rows. Maud counted the buttons, found one missing, and laughed at the empty jar. She pinned a clean sheet in its place, drew a heart in pencil, and began again at the anchor.