Black ink drawing of an ornate heart with a geometric centre, lace-like mandala panels and hanging chains, a design suited to a sternum or chest placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate heart and lace sternum design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black ink design of a large heart outlined with a braided border, with a smaller geometric heart and diamond shape at its centre. Fine lace-like panels, dotted shading, and strands of beads with teardrop pendants extend outward and downward from the heart. The drawing is in black linework and stipple on a plain white background, with symmetrical composition.

Dotwork Geometric Heart Lace Mandala Chain Diamond Bead Teardrop Ornament

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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

Dear Maureen, I have decided I am not coming to the reunion at Hartley Grammar on Saturday, but I am posting you the sampler instead, so you can pretend you were there. You'll remember Mum's pattern book with the big heart on the cover, the one she made us copy in double running stitch on Sunday afternoons while the kettle sulked on the hob.

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The heart in the middle was the hard part. She would make us count the holes in the net twice before we were let out to the rec, and the small diamond inside it was where the thread had to cross without knotting, or the whole panel would sag like wet washing. Mr Pryce from the mill came round in 1974 to buy the lot, and she wouldn't sell the drops, those little teardrop bobbins strung on silk that she said were the chain's way of falling back to earth.

I found the book in the loft last week, wedged under the Christmas tinsel. Forty pages, and on the very last one, in her slanted hand, a line I had never noticed before: Finish the heart before the chain, or the chain will not hang true. I sat on the boxes with my knees up and read it three times.

I've pinned the sampler to the kitchen wall now, beads still threaded on every strand, and in the afternoon the window catches each drop and throws it onto the lino. If you do come on Saturday, bring a needle. Love, Ada.