Black line drawing of a stylised mother holding a child, with an awareness ribbon around them that contains a heart, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Mother and child with ribbon and heart design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised black line drawing shows a woman with long hair holding a smaller child in her arms. The figure's body is formed by a ribbon outline that curls around a nested heart shape in the centre. The design uses solid black silhouettes for the heads and bold uniform outlines on a plain white background.

Mother Child Ribbon Heart Awareness ribbon Figure

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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

Brother Anselm hands you the spool before the bell for Lauds has finished echoing off the cloister stones, and tells you to keep your stitches small, because the banner for the feast of the Holy Name has to hang from the refectory beams by Thursday. You are sixteen weeks into the novitiate and still count your breaths when you thread a needle. The cloth is grey linen, bought from a widow in the market town who wanted nothing for it but prayers.

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The design comes on a sheet of squared paper, pricked through with a pin so the outline shows through the cloth. A ribbon loops from the top of the banner down to its hem, and inside its curve someone has drawn a heart, and inside the heart another, smaller and rounder. You are to fill the ribbon in pale thread and outline the heart in dark. Brother Anselm says the figures at the top were the old sisters' idea: a woman carrying a child on her hip, two dark heads, one bending toward the other. He does not say why they wanted it there.

On the third afternoon a mother and her girl come up the lane from the bus, the child swinging a plastic bag of pears. The mother asks to see the banner, and the girl presses her palm flat against the grey cloth as if testing whether it is warm. You watch her finger find the ribbon's edge and follow it the whole way round, never lifting, until she reaches the place where you have left a gap in the outline.

"You forgot to finish that bit," she says.

Brother Anselm laughs. You do not. You thread the needle again, and you leave the gap open, because the heart needs somewhere to come out.