Black ink pen drawing of a heart with a bow at the top, corset-style lacing down the centre and cross-stitched seams on each side, shown as a tattoo design sketch.

Laced heart with stitches and bow

Black and grey · Flash

A heart outline is filled with fine hatched pen lines that give it shading and depth. A bow sits at the top, with ribbon-like laces crossing the centre and trailing downwards, alongside two columns of cross-stitches on either side. The drawing is in black ink on white paper, with no colour and a centred composition.

Heart Bow Lace Corset Stitches Ribbon

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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

Dear Nell, the ferry came in on Tuesday with your parcel, and I have the ribbon you asked for, though the blue is more grey than you described. Mr Haldane's wife has sent the wedding gown back to me twice now, saying the lacing pulls wrong at the seams. I have unpicked it three times. The trouble is not the eyelets. She laces it herself each morning, tight as a fishing knot, and the cloth has stretched into the shape of whatever she is carrying.

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I told her a bow at the neck would hide the strain, so I sewed one the size of a gull's wing, and she wept at it. Then she asked me to stitch down the side panels where the seams had split, the way her mother's were closed after the boat went down off Stack Skerry. I did it, and I counted every stitch, and I thought about the men who never came back to this island and the wives who laced themselves shut rather than let anything out.

Last night I found the old pattern book in the chest, with a heart drawn in it, laced and stitched and trailing its ribbon towards the hem. Under it my mother had written in pencil: mend, don't close. So I have left the centre open, a diamond of bare cloth where the lacing can be loosened whenever she needs it.

The gulls are loud over the harbour this morning. I will take the gown up to the house before the tide turns, and I will leave the ribbon ends long, so she can pull them herself. Your loving sister, Ada.