Black and white photo of a fine line heart with a curling swirl tattooed on the nape of a person's neck, with hair pulled up.

Small heart with swirl on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small heart outline with a curling spiral extending from its right side sits on the back of a neck. The linework is thin and even, in a single dark ink with no shading. The photograph is black and white, with soft lighting and the subject shown from behind, with hair pulled up and no face visible.

Fine line Neck Heart Swirl Outline

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

The letter came up the pass tied inside my coat, because the carrier had died at Hollin Cross the week before and nobody else would go over in February. I kept the wax seal against my ribs all the way up from the valley. A plain heart pressed into red wax, and off its right side a curl of wax like the end of a fern. The stationer in Settle swore it was a ram's horn and the postmaster swore it was a scroll.

Keep reading

By the cairn the wind took my hat and the snow began coming sideways. I sheltered in the lee of the wall and read the front of the envelope, which held only a name, Ellen Cotterill, and a farm I knew well: Lower Scar, where the lane gives out. Ellen and I had sat on the same bench at chapel school. She had written to a man in the lowlands, and he had never answered, and the only reply that ever came was from his mother, asking her to stop.

I did not open it. I held it a long while with my fingers gone numb on the wax. Then I thought about that curl, how it kept turning back on itself as if the heart had set out one way and changed its mind halfway. I buttoned the letter back inside my coat and walked on, slower, counting the stone gateposts.

At Lower Scar the door stood open and the kettle was already on the hob. Ellen took the letter without looking at the front and broke the seal with her thumb. She read it standing, then sat down on the step in the snow and laughed until she cried. I left her there with the empty envelope in her lap and walked home down the valley with nothing in my coat but the cold.