Black and grey scrollwork heart tattoo with a small pink heart and the number 9 at its base, on a area of skin on the upper leg.

Scrollwork heart with a small pink heart

Other · Mixed · Photo

A large heart outline is built from ornate, curling scrollwork with shaded edges that give it a raised, engraved look. A smaller solid pink heart sits at the bottom point, with a number 9 drawn across its centre in dark outline. The black and grey shading surrounds a single pink accent against pale skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Other Heart Scrollwork Swirl

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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

Mind the step, there, it's worn where a hundred years of boots have gone up and down it. Pull your chair in. The gas is hissing and Mrs Haddon has put the kettle on, so you'll sit till the end of this, same as the last time.

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You want to know about the ironmonger's son who made the gates for the Pelham Street railings. Old Tobias Wren, they called him, though he was only thirty when he took the ironwork contract. He could bend a bar of iron into a fern that looked like it had grown in the rain. Every scroll he made had a hook at the end, a little curl that turned back on itself, and he said a curl that turned back was a thing that kept its promise. Nobody laughed at him for it, not to his face.

He had a sweetheart, Nell Ashby, who sold ribbons across the road. When the foundry closed for the winter she came to the workshop with a heart cut from a tin lid and asked him to make her one that would not rust. He worked three nights on it. The scrolls swirled round and round until the outline was as dense as lace, and at the bottom point he hammered out a small heart of red-painted copper and stamped the number nine into its middle, because that was the year they met, and he was not a man for speeches.

She wore it on a chain until the day the trams stopped running, and after that it hung on the back of the workshop door, where it still is. Go on, lean over. Look at the little copper heart at the bottom. The paint has worn pink in the middle where a thumb has rubbed it, year on year, for a long time. Mind that step on your way out.