Small solid black heart tattoo on a shoulder, with a tie-dye fabric edge and warm sunlight across the skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small heart tattoo on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black heart sits on the upper shoulder of a bare-skinned person, with a few freckles and small marks nearby. The heart is filled in with black ink and has a clean, simple outline, with no shading or other colour. A blue and pink tie-dye fabric sits at the lower edge of the frame, and warm sunlight flares across the right side.

Shoulder Heart

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

Now sit where the wind can't get at you, because this is the true one, the one my mother told me while she was scraping limpets off the slipway. There was a dyer on Inchmurra called Ailsa Brodie who kept her vats in the old byre, blue from woad and pink from madder, and she sold cloth to every boat that came into the bay. Her husband went north for the herring and never came back with his nets full, only with stories, and she grew tired of hearing them.

Keep reading

So one winter she took the last lump of lamp-black from the kiln and pressed a heart into the palm of her own hand, and she told the gulls it was a promise. The gulls did not care. Neither did the sea. But the heart would not wash off, not with lye, not with salt, and when the spring tide came up the slipway it was still sitting there, small and black and certain, like a coal someone had forgotten to put out.

Her husband came home that April with the wind behind him and a sailcloth rolled under his arm, dyed the colour of a bruised sunset. He asked her what she had done to her hand. She showed him, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on a creel. Then he took her hand and pressed it flat against the cloth, and where her palm had been there was a black heart on a field of pink and blue, and the whole village came down to look at it.

That is why the boats from Inchmurra never sail without a mark of soot somewhere on the wood. Hush now. Your father is coming up the path, and he has been at the herring again.