Traditional flash drawing of a flaming sacred heart ringed with red roses and dark leaves, in colour on a cream sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sacred heart with roses flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a black heart with a dotted and white-lined border, topped by a flame rising from a urn-like base. Three red roses with white highlights and black outlines sit across the heart, with dark green-black leaves fanning out behind. The design is shown in bold black outline and flat colour on a plain cream background, centred on the sheet.

Traditional Rose Flame Leaves

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

Harriet Pell kept the lock at Stennard Cut for thirty years, and in all that time the black barge Ember never once came through by daylight. It came at dusk, low in the water, with a brass lamp burning on its cabin roof that gave no heat and cast no shadow. Her father had warned her never to take a rope from its skipper, a long grey man who paid in old pennies and asked only that the gate be left open.

Keep reading

One October the skipper came with his hands wrapped in linen and asked for something else. His wife had gone down the cut the winter before, he said, and her heart had been left behind in the lock chamber. He wanted it back before the water froze. Harriet told him the chamber held nothing but weed and drowned pennies. He opened a tin on the towpath and showed her a heart of charred wood, black as a stove, ringed with brass studs, with three red roses pressed against it as if they were trying to keep it warm.

She knew those roses. Her mother had grown them along the lock wall, and they bloomed on the third of every month whatever the weather. Harriet took a lantern, climbed down the ladder into the dry chamber, and found the heart wedged behind a sluice paddle, still faintly warm. When she lifted it, the flame on the barge lamp flared white, and for a moment the skipper's face was a young man's.

He did not thank her. He set the heart in the cabin, lit it, and the barge slid upstream without a sound. Next morning the gates stood open, and three roses grew on the wall where none had been.