Two wrists side by side, each with a black fingerprint-pattern heart tattoo, with a dark grey bird-like tattoo on the left forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching fingerprint heart tattoos on wrists

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms rest together, each showing a heart-shaped tattoo made of fingerprint-like ridge lines in black ink. The left arm also has a larger dark grey tattoo of a bird-like shape, partly cropped at the edge of the frame. The image is taken at close range against a plain skin tone and a dim background, with the ink appearing grey-black throughout.

Forearm Heart Fingerprint Bird

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 ferry had already slipped past the breakwater when the swift came down on the salt-house rail, and it would not fly north until Maren pressed her thumb to its breast. That was the bargain her grandmother struck with the birds in the years after the grid failed, when the mainland stopped sending letters and the only way to know a person was alive was to read their ridges. Nobody in Stillwater Reach had found a reason to break it.

Keep reading

Tobiah had gone north in the spring with a satchel of lamp oil and a promise to come back before the herring turned. He reached the drowned archive at Kell, pressed his print into the wet glass of the reading room, and the swift that followed him carried those whorls back south so Maren could check them against her own. When the bird laid the two prints side by side they made a heart, and her grandmother said that was how the birds knew which hearts to keep flying for.

The herring turned. The tide came in twice without a sail on the water. Maren walked the wall each dusk, pressing her own thumb to the cold stone where his ridges should have met hers. On the ninth evening the swift came back alone, low over the shallows, and dropped a grey feather onto the slate by her boots.

She did not weep, or not where the gulls could see. She pressed her thumb to the bird's breast one more time, watched it climb toward the north star, then went inside and lit the lamp in the upper window, the one Tobiah had always said a man could steer by from the middle of the sound. Somewhere out there a boat would see it and know which way home was.