Black and grey lace-style heart tattoo with a scalloped border, dotted lines and small flower motifs, placed across the upper chest.

Lace-style heart on the upper chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large heart outline with a scalloped, lace-like border sits centrally on the upper chest. Inside, a dotted line and curling filigree run parallel to the outline, with small four-petalled flowers placed at intervals. The work uses fine black linework and dotwork with grey shading, and the image is framed tightly around the chest with no face visible.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Heart Lace Flower Filigree 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

Nan never drew a heart on paper first. She pricked it straight onto the card, one pinhole at a time, holding the needle the way other women held a teacup, and she would not let anyone tell her where the dots should go. Mum called it stubbornness. I thought it was the only honest thing in that cottage.

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The pattern she left me was a heart in a scalloped frame, with a row of dots running round it like stitches that had forgotten to join. Inside the dots ran a curl of filigree, and at intervals sat four-petalled flowers she insisted on calling pansies, though they looked nothing like pansies. Every bobbin on the pillow had to be wound for its place. I spent a whole winter on the first border and cried over the join, and Nan sat in her chair and said nothing, which was worse.

In March the merchant from Exeter came for the orders. He held my finished piece to the window so the light came through every hole and asked who had pricked the card. I said I had. He said the flowers were too heavy and the heart sat wrong, and the old anger rose in my throat. Then he turned the lace over and showed me the back. Beneath my work, pinned so faintly that only the window could find it, Nan had left a second heart, plain and small, with a single dot in the middle for me.

I did not tell him. I folded the piece in tissue and put it in the drawer beside her pins. When the next order came, I pricked the dots myself, following hers exactly, and left a gap at the foot of the scallops where a girl might one day add her own.