Traditional tattoo of a pink heart with a dotted outline and a grey banner reading Myself, on the inner forearm.

Pink heart with banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pink heart with a bold black outline and a row of dotted border marks sits on the forearm. A grey ribbon banner crosses the lower part of the heart and carries the word Myself in black script. The tattoo is centred on plain skin against a light background, with a dark leather surface visible to the right.

Traditional Forearm Heart Banner Script Word Outline

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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

By the last week of August the Hollis orchard has stopped pretending it needs you, but you go down the rows anyway with a tin bucket knocking against your knee. Wasps work the windfalls under the Bramleys. Ned sits on his three-legged stool by the gate with his knife open on his thigh and a stick of rootstock clamped in the vice, and he does not look up when you arrive, which is how you know he has been waiting.

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He has been grafting since before the war, he says, and he will go on until the knife forgets his hand. Today's scion is cut from the old Ribston that split in the spring gales. You make the wedge cut with him, slow, the way he taught you, and you hold the stock steady while he binds it with waxed cotton. 'Now you label it,' he says, and hands you a strip of lead and a nail. The label is meant to carry the variety. You have a different word already, and your hand has started scratching it in before you can argue.

Ned takes the strip, turns it the right way up, and reads it twice. He laughs until he has to wipe his eyes on his sleeve. 'That's no variety,' he says. 'But fair enough. A graft keeps its own wood, and it'll fruit whatever you call it. What it drinks comes from below.' He doesn't say anything else about it, which is worse and kinder than a lecture would have been.

You hammer the lead onto the stake while the sky goes the colour of pewter over the top orchard. Rain is forecast for Thursday, and by October the letters will have softened into grey smudges. The graft will still hold, though, the cotton gone dark and the cambium knitting quietly underneath, and next autumn the branch will bend under fruit nobody can name.