A shaded outline tattoo of a scythe with a small heart at the top of its handle, on the forearm.

Scythe with a heart on the forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a scythe with a curved blade and a long handle that bends down the forearm. A small heart sits where the handle meets the blade, and the handle is filled with reddish-pink tones. The linework is dark and the grey shading gives the blade and handle some depth.

Forearm Scythe Heart Blade

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

Ada Pollard had been sharpening the Thwaite meadow scythes for thirty-one years, and she still could not look at the heart on the handle of her husband's without her thumb going to it. Walt had burned it into the ash with a hot poker the summer they married, and the scorched outline had worn to a pale pink where his palm rested. Every August she carried the blade to the whetstone shed behind the Plough and sat with it across her knees.

Keep reading

The meadow was due cutting on the Saturday. Simon Ferris, the curate's boy, had offered to take the scythe in her stead, but he swung it like a man beating a rug. Ada watched from the gate as he hacked at the seed heads, the blade skipping off the stones and biting the turf. 'Lower your wrists,' she called, and he laughed, did it wrong again, and wiped his brow with the back of a glove.

That evening she oiled the handle with linseed and found the heart had lifted at one edge where the grain had split. She pressed it down with her thumb, slowly, the way Walt used to, and the wood gave a little. She thought about the long bend of the shaft, how a good scythe follows the body rather than fighting it, and how she had never once told him that was what she loved about him.

On the Saturday the grass fell in long clean swathes. Simon stood at the wall with his hands in his pockets, quieter now. Ada let him keep the handle for the last row, and when he finished, the heart was still whole under his palm.