Black ink line drawing of an ornate heart with mandala-style patterns, leaves and trailing vines, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Ornate heart with vines and leaves

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a heart outline filled with dotted and looped mandala-style patterns. Leaves and flowers sit at the top, and a long vine with small curls and buds trails down from the base of the heart. The linework is fine and even on a plain cream background, with the design centred in the frame.

Botanical Geometric Heart Mandala Leaves Vine Flower Paisley Swirl

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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

The drawing came in on the Tuesday with a bundle of umbrellas and a single glove, folded into quarters and pressed flat inside a library book about Cornish birds. I was the one who logged it. Lost property at Millbrook Junction is a shelf, a ledger and a kettle, and most things that reach the shelf are never claimed.

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Nobody claimed it. I unfolded it under the lamp at closing time and traced the heart with my finger without quite meaning to. Someone had spent hours on it: little rings of dots inside the outline, a lace of loops like frost on a window, and a vine that curled down past the edge of the page with a bud at the end of it. The last train to Carrick had gone by then. Through the glass I could see the platform lamps and the rain.

I rang the station master's office, then the ticket barrier, then the café. Nobody knew whose it was. The woman at the café said a girl had been drawing at table four all afternoon, filling paper with pen while her tea went cold, and then she had gone for the 16:40 in a hurry. Her bag was still in the back room. Nothing in it but a sandwich and a tin of pencils, and a second sheet of paper with the same heart, half finished.

I pinned the drawing above the kettle with a brass drawing pin. On the late shift I sometimes look up at the vine running down the wall toward the floor and think of it carrying on past the page, out through the barrier and along the line, every little curl still growing somewhere she hasn't finished yet.