Close photo of a red heart in an ornate blue-and-gold frame on the forearm, traditional style, with a shaved scalloped design on the back of a head beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red heart in ornate frame on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A person is photographed from behind with one hand resting on their head. A colour tattoo of a red heart sits inside an ornate frame with blue and gold tones on the upper forearm. The shaved scalloped pattern on the back of the head is a haircut design, not a tattoo, and the image has soft, even daylight with a plain grey background.

Traditional Forearm Heart Frame Ornate frame Hand

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

The snow had been falling three days when the stranger came up the pass road carrying a heart under his arm. He held it in a frame of blue enamel edged with gold, the way a man carries a picture of his mother to church. Mistress Orla at the Blackthorn Inn let him in because the drifts had closed the road behind him, and because the frame was the bluest thing she had seen all winter.

Keep reading

The heart was red as rowan berries, and it sat in its frame as if it were listening. He set it on the mantel above the fire and said it belonged to a woman in the lowland towns who had given it away to settle a debt of kindness. It would only stay warm for the one it was owed to. Orla laughed at him. Then she noticed the carters and the widow from the mill had gone quiet and were watching the heart the way people watch a kettle before it sings.

Through the night it pulsed, slow as a sleeper's breath. Toward morning a young shepherd came stamping to the door with frost in his beard. He had walked the pass for two days looking for the girl he had left at the last inn without a word. Orla took the frame down and gave it to him. He held it in both hands, and the enamel went warm under his palms.

When the thaw came, the stranger's settle was empty and the mantel was bare. But the blue paint had flaked from the wall where the frame had hung, and nobody at the Blackthorn ever scrubbed that patch clean.