Back view of a woman with a colour tattoo of a red heart inside an ornate blue and gold frame on her upper arm, with her hand in her hair and a shaved scalloped pattern at the nape.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red heart in ornate frame on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with one hand raised to her head. A colour tattoo of a red anatomical-style heart sits inside an ornate frame with a pale teal background on the upper arm, and a darker ornamental tattoo is partly visible above it. The shaved nape pattern is a hairstyling design rather than ink, and it appears against a plain grey wall.

Upper arm Heart Ornate frame Hair

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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 frame came in on a Tuesday train with a luggage tag tied to its corner that said only KEEP HIM DRY. Inside the gilt scrollwork, under glass with a crack across one corner, was a red heart the size of a fist, sitting on a field of pale teal as if it had been asked to pose and had decided to be patient about it.

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Lost property at Hollinbridge is a shelf of umbrellas, one prosthetic leg nobody has claimed in six years, and me. I logged the frame under Miscellaneous, Painted, then crossed that out and wrote Heart, because the form had no box for what it was.

A man called Desmond Rook came in every Thursday for three weeks, asking whether it had turned up. He never described it properly. He would only say the teal was the colour of the carriage seats on the old Settle line, and that the heart was his mother's idea of a joke, though he never explained the joke. I kept it on the shelf behind the umbrellas and dusted the glass when I had nothing better to do.

On the fourth Thursday he arrived with a ticket for Carlisle already in his hand and said he was going north for a job, not coming back. He stood looking at the frame for a long time. Leave it, he said. It has nowhere else to be. I hung it above the kettle, where the teal catches the light from platform two, and every time the 4:10 pulls out the heart seems to knock once against the glass.