Traditional style colour tattoo of two red hearts with orange banners reading MOM and DAD in blue lettering, on the upper arm.

Mom and Dad hearts with banners on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two red hearts are stacked vertically, each wrapped by an orange and yellow ribbon banner. The words MOM and DAD are set in blue letters with dark outlines on the banners. Bold black outlines and smooth colour shading give the hearts volume, and the design fills the frame against a dark clothing background.

Traditional Upper arm Heart Banner Ribbon Mom Dad Lettering

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 bosun swore the parlour above a shoe repairer in Valparaíso was the only place on the coast that could do a heart straight, so we went ashore with forty dollars between four of us and a bottle of something the cook had decanted into an old Fanta bottle. Gil wanted a swordfish. Pelly wanted his wife's name, which he kept misspelling on the back of his hand so he'd have a reason to look at it. I had only one idea, the sort a man can't be talked out of after three drinks.

Keep reading

The artist was a broad woman with a cigarette tucked behind one ear. She looked at my sketch on a beer mat and said, "Mother and father, then. Let the banners do the work." She didn't ask me to explain anything. She drew two hearts stacked one above the other, bigger than I'd meant, and wound a ribbon round each the way a bosun coils a line on a dry deck, tight and tidy, with a little tail left loose at the bottom to flick the eye along.

It took her most of an afternoon. The buzz of the machine rattled the window glass, and Gil fell asleep on a bench with his swordfish still unfinished in his head. When she wiped the last of the ink away, the colours had come up bright as signal flags, the red of the hearts almost wet, the letters blue with dark edges like a sailor's lettering on a hatch cover.

Back aboard, the cook asked which of the two was the bigger trouble. I told him they had always been stacked that way, one on the other, and that in thirty years at sea the ribbons had never once come loose.