Two photos of a colourful patchwork heart tattoo with a red sewing button, outlined in black on skin, in a fine line style with coloured fabric patterns.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Patchwork heart with red button

Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a heart divided into patchwork panels filled with yellow, pink, blue and green patterns, including checks, stripes, dots and florals. A red four-hole button sits at the centre of the heart and is shaded to look three-dimensional. Thin black outlines define each panel, and the top and bottom photos show the same design from slightly different angles.

Heart Button Polka dot Floral Stripe

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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

Nell had the red button between her teeth when the hull alarm started, which told me she was more frightened than she let on, because she never let go of anything she was sewing. We had nine squares of salvage left: yellow dotted cotton from the galley aprons, a blue check from a dead man's shirt, green stripes off the hydroponics tarps, and a scrap of pink floral that still smelled faintly of the orchard before the blight. Everything else on Corvane had been unpicked, rewoven or burned.

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The breach was the size of a hand, low on the spine of the ship where the old seal had gone brittle. Ines said a heart would hold where a circle would not, because a circle has nowhere for the pull to go, and she had sewn enough quilts to trust her instincts over the engineers'. We worked on our knees in the cold passage with frost climbing the walls. I cut the panels with the ship's shears while Nell pinned them to the weld plate, the blue check meeting the green stripes along a seam that refused to lie flat.

When the last panel was down, Nell took the button from her mouth and pressed it into the centre of the heart. Four holes, worn smooth at the edges, sewn on by somebody's grandmother so long ago that nobody aboard could say whose coat it had come from. She pushed the thread through with her thumb and pulled it tight, and the whole patchwork shivered once, the way a sleeping animal does.

The alarm stopped at the third bell. Frost stayed out of that passage the next night, and the one after. Nell still keeps the offcut of pink floral in her pocket, its loose threads trimmed, and when the pipes knock in the dark she touches it the way you would touch a sleeping child's hand.