Neo-trad style tattoo on a forearm of a heart made from banknotes marked 100 and 10, with scrollwork and a red banner reading MOM.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Money heart with MOM banner on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A heart formed from banknotes marked 100 and 10 sits at the centre of the design, with ornate scrollwork curling around it and a red banner reading MOM across the top. The heart and banknotes are shaded in black and grey with soft tonal gradients, while the banner and a red drip below it add the colour. The design fills the forearm in a tall, diagonal composition against a silver background.

Neo-trad Forearm Heart Banknote Money Scroll Banner Ribbon Mom

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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

You want to know about the heart, then. Sit down, the stove's still warm, and don't let your grandfather tell it, he never once got it right. I'll give it you as it happened, with the sea in it.

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Tomas Reyes was a stoker on the Caledonia Star, a rust bucket out of Liverpool that carried coal to Buenos Aires and brought back whatever the Argentines would sell us cheap. Every fortnight he got his pay in a brown envelope, and every fortnight he took out the tens and the hundreds and sent them home to his mother in Bootle, because he did not trust a post office in a foreign port. He said money was the only thing a man owned that could cross an ocean without him having to carry it. Mrs Ellery at the chandler's used to laugh at him for that.

In the third winter the boiler cracked off the Azores and they lay two days with the engines dead and the sea grey as pewter. Tomas sat on the coal with his back to the bulkhead and folded a month's wages, note by note, pinching each one and tucking it under the last until the whole bundle curled round on itself like a valentine. He sealed it in an envelope with red wax, and wrote MOM across the front in capitals so the postman would not mistake it for a bill.

When the Star finally came up the Mersey, the envelope was the first thing he handed his mother. She didn't open it until the kettle had boiled twice. Then she unfolded the heart slowly, and the whole flat smelled of coal dust and salt. She kept the tens and gave the hundreds back to him, to spend on a decent coat for the next voyage. That is the joke of it, and I always laughed where he did.