Black ornamental heart tattoo made of swirling scrollwork and leaf shapes, sitting on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate heart tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tattoo forms an open heart outline built from curling scrollwork, tapered leaf or flame shapes and small dots. The heavy, bold linework has a flat black fill with no shading, and the design is centred across the upper back. There is no colour ink, and the skin shows freckles and a few moles around the design.

Back Heart Scrollwork Leaves Swirl Ornament Dot

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, the candle is nearly out and I am too old to say this twice. You want to hear how the ink-master of Saint Edrith's came to draw a heart with a gap in it? Then mind the dogs, they have been at the bread again.

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Brother Osric was the finest penman on the fen in the year the river froze to the mill wheels. He could make a capital bloom like a rose opening in the morning. The abbot wanted a psalter for the bishop, and Osric was given the best vellum and the oak galls to make his black. But his nephew Tobin had gone over the sea with the wool boats and had not written since Michaelmas. Every night Osric practised the same curl, a leaf that rose from a stem and turned back on itself like a flame that would not go out.

Sister Wenna from the laundry came in one evening with candles and watched him work. Her hands were red from the lye. 'You are drawing a heart,' she said. 'Then leave the top open, or nothing can get in.' So he did. He lifted the scrolls at the crown and let the two halves reach apart like hands not quite clasped, and he filled the leaves solid so they would outlast us all. Where his pen had hesitated, a drop of ink fell from the nib, and he left it there as a single dot below the point.

Tobin came home at Lent, thinner, with salt in his beard, and found the psalter open at that page. He did not speak. He only put his thumb into the gap at the top of the heart and held it there while the bells went for vespers. Osric always said the rest was only ink. Now go to bed, and mind the candle.