Sketch-style black and grey tattoo on an upper arm showing a woman's face with crossed arms and a small red heart, with a mirrored face below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketched woman and heart on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face appears at the top of the design and an inverted face sits below, with crossed arms and hands across the middle. The linework is loose and sketchy, with heavy black shading and scratchy strokes, and a small red heart sits over the crossed arms as the only colour. The tattoo fills the upper arm in a vertical composition against a plain light background.

Upper arm Woman Face Hand Heart

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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

You have been standing in the orchard since the first windfalls began to split on the grass, and the wasps find the bruised ones before you do. The pond at the bottom of the rows is low this year, its surface skinned with pollen and dead leaves, and when you lean over the rim to fill the bucket your face comes up to meet you from below, upside down, as if the water has decided to keep its own copy.

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Your grandmother told you the pond keeps what the orchard drops. Apples, letters, a child's shoe from the year the lane flooded. You laughed at her then. Now you crouch with your arms folded across your chest, the way she used to hold you when thunder came over the ridge, and you watch the other woman in the water fold her arms in the same slow way, hands pressed to her ribs where a small red warmth sits like a held coal.

It is not a hard thing to say the next part. You say it to the water. You say you are sorry for the apples you let rot, for the door you shut on the kitchen, for every time you turned your face away from the one who came looking for you. The reflection does not speak. It only lifts its chin, and the ripples carry your voice back across the rows.

When the bucket is full you stand up too quickly and the pond goes still again. Your own face is there at the top of the water, plain and unfinished, and you find that you are smiling, which you had not expected. Behind you the trees are dropping their fruit in the heat, one soft thud after another, and you do not go back to count them.