Colour tattoo of a patchwork heart stitched closed with dark thread, with a silver needle threaded through its right side, in a neo-trad style on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Patchwork heart with needle and thread

Neo-trad · Colour · Photo

A heart is built from patchwork panels in pink, green, yellow, orange and blue, with the panels joined by dark stitching. A silver needle with a dark thread runs through the right side of the heart, and dark stitches also run along the lower edge. The fills use solid colour with soft shading and a dark outline, and the design sits centred on a plain area of skin.

Neo-trad Heart Stitches Needle Thread Polka dot Flower

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

Nell had the church hall's quilting frame set up before the kettle boiled, and the first thing she said to Mr Oakes was that his coat was past saving. He had brought it in folded over one arm, as though it might be listened to. A tear ran from the cuff to the elbow, neat as a seam someone had started and given up on.

Keep reading

She took her bag of scraps from the drawer under the counter. Pink gingham from a girl's summer frock, a green diamond print left over from curtains, yellow with red spots cut from an old tablecloth in the back room. Nothing matched, and she liked that. She pinned the patches with her mouth full of pins and worked the stitches in dark thread along every edge, the way her mother had taught her, so the join showed rather than hid.

Oakes watched the needle the way other men watched the football. "You'll not make it pretty," he said.

"It doesn't need to be pretty," Nell said. "It needs to hold." When the patchwork was done she cut the last blue heart from a dress nobody wore any more and sewed it over the worst of the tear. She handed the coat back with loose thread still hanging from the lower edge, dark loops like a row of small knots. He put it on in the doorway and didn't say thank you, which was fine. She had already pulled the needle free and was threading the next one.