Colour tattoo of a red and orange shaded heart inside blue and yellow filigree scrollwork on the upper arm, in a Neo-trad style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate heart and scrollwork on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A heart sits at the centre of a radial design of ornate filigree and scrollwork. The heart is shaded in red and orange with a ridged, fan-like pattern, while the surrounding scrolls and points use blue, yellow and pale tones with small red accents. The design spreads outward in a circular composition that wraps across the upper arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Heart Filigree Scrollwork Mandala Ornament

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

Tomas had been twisting silver wire for eleven days when the lamp at Gull Point failed for the first time in forty years. The keeper's daughter came down the harbour steps with a cracked lens wrapped in a tea towel and a request he did not want to hear. She wanted a heart, the old Portuguese kind her grandmother had worn, with scrolls growing out of it like frost on a pane. Blue for the sea, she said, and yellow for the lamp, and red at the points where the wire met.

Keep reading

He drew it first on the back of a tide table, and the scrolls came easily enough, curling outward in rings until the paper ran out. The centre would not sit right. Every ridge he pressed came out flat. The pattern he wanted was the fan of a scallop shell, the one his mother used to press into candle wax when he was small, and he had not thought about her hands in years.

He stayed at the bench past midnight with the work lamp humming. Around two, the fishing boats began to come in without a light to guide them, and he went to the window and saw the black water where the beam should have crossed. He took the finished heart, still warm from the torch, and carried it up the headland inside his coat.

At the top the keeper's girl was waiting on the gallery rail with a hurricane lamp. He hung the heart from the lamp housing on a loop of copper wire, and it turned slowly in the air. Its shadow fell across the water in a fan of ribs, and the first boat steered towards it. By dawn the keeper had the lens back in its frame, but nobody took the silver heart down, and it kept turning there above the rocks.