Close photo of a red heart with a white banner and black swirl details, a traditional style tattoo on the upper arm.

Red heart with banner and swirls on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A red heart sits inside a white banner with black outlines and curled swirl details, with a small section of another tattoo visible at the upper left. The linework is bold and clean, with flat red fill on the heart and open white space on the banner. The subject is centred against a plain light background, with a black and white striped sleeve on the right.

Traditional Upper arm Heart Banner Swirl Ribbon

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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 banner had been meant for a name, Mrs Pilling insisted, and it was Gordon who had talked her out of it at the Whitby kiosk in 1974, when the sea was too rough for the ferry and the Mermaid Parlour had only one stool left. Now the ribbon sat empty above the boarding house's back stairs, a white strip with nothing written on it, and Hettie Frayne had been asked to dust around it every Thursday for six years.

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She hated Thursdays. The lodgers came down to breakfast with their sleeves rolled, comparing ink the way other people compared gardens, and Mrs Pilling would stand at the hatch with the teapot and say nothing about the plain red heart on the sideboard, the one she had drawn herself on the back of a rent book. Hettie had asked once what it meant. Mrs Pilling said it meant the rent was due.

On the last Thursday of August, the new lodger sat at the window table with his shirt off, waiting for the kettle, and Hettie saw that he had the same swirls curling out from his elbow, the same flick of wind on either side, as if someone had copied the heart from the rent book and carried it round the coast on skin. She put the duster down. Mrs Pilling came through with the teapot and stopped.

"Well," she said. "Somebody's been reading my handwriting." Then she poured him a cup and left the room, and Hettie understood, for the first time, that the empty banner had never been waiting for a name. It had been waiting for someone to ask.