Fine line black dotwork tattoo of a rosary forming a heart shape with a cross at the end, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Rosary heart and cross on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo on the inner wrist shows a rosary made of dots arranged in a heart shape, with a triangular centrepiece and a cross hanging below. The beads are rendered as solid dots and the chain as fine dotted lines, all in black ink. The tattoo sits centred on a plain skin background, with a patterned fabric and a hand visible at the right edge.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Rosary Heart Cross Bead

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

Mind your feet on the cobbles, they've been slick since noon, and stand under the awning where Mrs Okafor sells her thread. Good. Now listen, because I'm only telling this once before the rain gets into my knees.

Keep reading

There was a girl on this market, years back, who sold loose beads from a tray on a trestle by the fish stalls. Glass beads, jet beads, little wooden ones gone grey from handling. Every Saturday she strung them for anyone who asked, and she would never sell a string without a cross on the end, because her grandmother had told her a bead without a cross is only a bead.

One wet morning a boy came with a broken chain and a handful of coins he had counted three times. He wanted a heart, he said, because his mother had one, and he could not say why. So she sat in the rain with her fingers gone numb and worked the beads round in a loop, dot by dot, the way you'd trace the shape of a sleeping cat. The heart closed at the top. She set a small triangle in the dip, and at the bottom she hung a cross no longer than a fingernail.

He paid her in the wrong coins. She never found out whether he came back, but his mother did, a week later, and bought the same string in silver for her own wrist, and said nothing about the boy at all.