Close photo of a red heart tattoo with black outline, filled with rows of chevron-like knit stitches, on a person's lower limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red knitted-look heart tattoo on a limb

Other · Colour · Photo

A heart filled with rows of red, leaf-shaped stitches arranged in a chevron pattern, suggesting knitting or cable work. The outline is black and the shapes are shaded with lighter highlights and darker red edges to give some dimension. The heart is centred on a pale limb, with a blurred floor and a few out-of-focus objects at the edges of the frame.

Other Heart Stitches

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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

You have the wool on the kitchen table before the kettle has boiled, forty skeins of red worsted that Dorrie bought off a cart at the Peterhead quay and swore was dyed with madder root. Your hands know the pattern without you looking: knit two, purl one, slip the stitch, and the cable rises like a shoal of herring and falls away again. Tam sails on the Good Intent at four tomorrow, and he has never owned a jersey that didn't smell of someone else's sheep.

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You knit through the night. Each row of leaf-shaped stitches runs the same way, and by the time the window greys you have a heart worked into the chest panel, its chevrons meeting at the point the way the boats meet at the harbour mouth. Dorrie says it's soft for a man who guts cod for a living. You tell her the heart is for the cable, not for him, and she laughs, because you have never once been able to lie to her.

The Intent does not come back. Three days later a coastguard van rolls up the brae with its engine off, and you are at the table again with the last skein in your lap. You keep knitting, because stopping would mean the jersey is finished, and it is not finished, and nobody has told you what finished is supposed to feel like.

On the ninth morning a boy from the next close brings you a red cuff pulled up in a creel off Girdle Ness, the ribbing still tight, one leaf unravelled at the edge. You do not unpick anything. You cast on again, two left and one slipped, and you start the second sleeve.