Two matching black puzzle piece tattoos with pixelated hearts on the inner forearms near the wrists.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching puzzle piece tattoos on wrists

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists are placed side by side, each with a puzzle piece tattoo containing a pixelated heart. The left piece is drawn as a black outline with a solid black heart, while the right piece is solid black with a pale heart left as negative space. The ink is black only, shown against plain skin and a dark background.

Forearm Puzzle piece Heart Pixel art Matching

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 skipper's daughter cut the tokens in our loft above the net shed, the winter before the herring failed. Two squares of brass the size of a palm, each with a knob on one edge and a socket on the other, so they would lock only one way. She punched a heart into the face of one, a crude grid of tiny squares like the telegraph ticker had taught her, and filed the plain one clean. Then she handed me the bright blank piece and kept the dark one for Tom.

Keep reading

Tom took the dark one because he said a man ought to carry the weight. We were nineteen, stupid enough to think metal could keep a promise, and we pressed our wrists together on the quay to prove the halves fitted. The Harriet Rose went north in February with nine men aboard and a fog bank that came down like a dropped sheet.

She came home with seven. The harbourmaster asked who held the other half, and I lifted mine into the cold. Tom's was still on the bottom off Lindisfarne with him, but the empty heart in my pocket had gone grey and warm from handling, and every night I turned it over looking for the seam where his would have slotted.

In April the skipper's daughter came down to the quay with a bag of fresh twine and sat beside me on the bollard. She took my token without asking, ran her thumb over the pale square, then pressed it against her own palm to feel the edge. She gave it back and started knotting, and the first mesh held.