Colour tattoo on a calf of a heart framing a tornado above a farmhouse, green Emerald City spires and red sparkly shoes on a yellow brick road, with the words There's no place like Home.

Ruby slippers and tornado in a heart on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A heart-shaped vignette shows a grey tornado lifting a small house on the left, green spires of the Emerald City on the right, and a pair of red sequinned shoes resting on a yellow brick road. The shading is painterly and smooth, with soft blue sky, layered green grass and glossy highlights on the shoes. Script lettering above and below the heart reads There's no place like Home.

Calf House Heart Lettering Quote

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 left heel had come away clean, which Dilys said was the shoe's own fault for wanting to travel. She laid the pair on the bench under the lamp and turned them so the sequins caught the light, a thousand small red coins gone dull at the toes where someone had walked too far on wet pavement.

Keep reading

Hannah Tully had carried them in on a Thursday, the week after the gale took the chapel roof off Cwm Road and set her gran's kitchen down in the allotments with the kettle still on the hob. "Mend them before I go," she said, and set a carrier bag of bus tickets on the counter as if they were a deposit. "Where are you going?" Dilys asked. "Round the back of the market, then the bus. I'll be back before the tea." Dilys did not believe her, and did not say so.

She worked slowly. She glued the heel, stitched the strap where it had frayed, and dabbed clear varnish over the bald patches so the red held. Her mother had kept a biscuit tin of old soles, each one labelled in pencil with the name of a customer and the words *good for dancing*. Dilys found a matching red leather scrap at the bottom of it and cut a patch the size of a thumbnail, and hummed while she worked, the way her mother used to, a tune with no words that always ended on a long note.

Hannah came back at dusk, though not by the market. Dilys heard the heels first, sharp on the cobbles outside, then the door opened and the bell gave its small cough. Hannah stood on the mat, took the shoes, and put them on without a word. At the threshold she stopped and tapped her heels together three times, and Dilys, who had never once in forty years been asked to witness such a thing, switched off the lamp and listened to the sound going down Cwm Road, one, two, three, until it stopped at the bus shelter and began again, coming back.