Tattoo flash design of a red heart with a bold black outline and white swirling flourishes, painted on brown kraft paper, with no body placement shown.

Red heart with white swirls

Colour · Flash

A painted design shows a glossy red heart outlined in thick black linework, tilted slightly with white highlights along its edges. White swirling flourishes with black accent strokes rise above the heart and curl below it, with small white and yellow dots scattered around. The flat brown kraft paper background keeps the focus on the bold, graphic composition.

Heart Swirl Flourish Dot

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 paint in the tin had gone thick as treacle by the time Dell handed me the brush, so I thinned it with a splash of linseed and told him it was a trick my father taught me, which it wasn't. We were forty miles past the last filling station on the Ocotillo Wells road, on a ladder bolted to the side of the Sunrise Motor Court, and the sign had been blank since the spring storms took its letters.

Keep reading

Dell wanted a heart. Not a neon one, he said, because neon was for people who had given up on sunlight. He wanted it red and glossy, outlined hard in black, tipped to one side as if it had been knocked off a shelf and was pleased about it. I laid down the gloss first, one pass, then a second where the light from the highway would catch it. The white came next, the swirls rising off the top like steam off a kettle, and each curl had to finish in a little bead, as though it had been caught mid-splash.

By sundown the heart was done and the dots were scattered beneath it, white and a few yellow ones that Dell insisted were stars for the lowest sign of the evening. A truck slowed at the bend, its driver leaning out to look, and then he laughed and flashed his lights twice.

Dell climbed down, wiped his hands on his jeans, and said the motel had been losing its name for years but never its customers. "Heart's the only thing out here that doesn't need a plug," he said. I didn't understand until the desert went quiet and the swirls caught the last of the light, looking for all the world like they were still moving.