Two fingers on different hands with small black and grey tattoos: a block shape with a red heart and a U on one finger, and a grey helmet-like shape above the words I know on the other.

Small finger tattoos with a red heart and text

Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two fingers are shown side by side, each with a small tattoo wrapped around the base of the finger. The left tattoo has a dark block-like shape, a small red heart and the letter U. The right tattoo has a grey, helmet-like shape with the word know below a dark band, with the rest of the phrase on the same finger. The linework is simple and bold with light grey shading, and the photo is taken close up against a plain skin background.

Hand Heart Helmet Text Finger tattoo

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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

Gather close, the fire wants company tonight. In the salt kingdom of Orrendell, where the river froze solid for seven winters, there lived a glassmaker's daughter named Imke Varrow, who could hold a whole summer inside a block of amber glass. Her father called it a gift. The lord of the high keep called it a weapon, and sent his men to fetch her.

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Her sweetheart was Aldous Penhallow, a mercenary with a temper like struck flint. The lord's captain wanted him for theft, and when the men came over the bridge, Imke sealed him in glass rather than let them drag him to the gallows. Four days she worked, pouring until the block was clear as river ice, and inside it he stood with his jaw set and one hand raised, neither living nor dead, only waiting.

On the fifth morning the captain came to the workshop with his iron mask fixed to his face, a helmet black as a cooking pot, and he asked the glassmaker's girl whether she was afraid of him. She set down her iron rod. "I love him," she said, and her voice did not shake. The mask turned toward her, and the captain said, flat as a stone dropped down a well, "I know."

Then he laughed, and it was the cruellest sound in Orrendell. Some say he wanted the glass for himself. Others say he only wanted to be loved the way the glass held Aldous. Imke kept the block on her windowsill for the rest of her years, and when children asked why it stayed warm to the touch, she told them it was the heat of a thing that had been loved, and let them believe her.