Black and white photo of a fine line outline heart tattoo on the upper arm, just below the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small outline heart on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small heart outline sits on the upper arm, just below the shoulder point, against smooth skin. The linework is thin and even, drawn as a single unshaded contour with no fill. The photograph is black and white with soft vignetting, and the subject fills the frame with a dark strap running diagonally across the shoulder.

Fine line Upper arm Heart 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

Pull that stool nearer the stove, love, it only gives heat for the first hour, and I won't tell this twice. You want the one about Tobiah Crane, the sign-writer on Wexford Lane? Fingers like wet rope, and he could draw a letter so true the paint never pooled at the corners. Nobody in this city could fill a letter the way he could leave one empty. He always said a shaded thing hides its own edges, but an outline tells you exactly where it stops.

Keep reading

He took on a girl called Mina Ferrar the winter the flood came up the lane. She was sixteen and too quick with her hands, always wanting to finish things. Across from the shop the bakery had shut, its window still ghosted with the ring of a hundred wet cups. Mrs Abara, who had kept that ovens going through three bad recessions, asked for one small mark over her door. Nothing gilded, mind. She had no money for gold leaf, only a wish to be remembered by something that didn't need paying for.

Mina drew it at first light, one unbroken stroke of black on the cold glass. No shading, no fill, just the line of it, thin as a hair. Tobiah came down the lane with his collar up, took one look and told her it was too faint, that the rain would have it off by Thursday. She said the rain came and went, but the line stayed where it was put. He didn't answer. He went back to the shop, scraped his own name off the board in the back room, and left her the good brush.

The rain came on the Thursday, as he'd said it would. The paint on the ground-floor glass ran in grey streaks and then ran off altogether. But the heart held its shape, because a thin line keeps the shape even when nothing else does. When the building came down in the spring, Mrs Abara had the pane cut out and carried it home under her arm. Some nights, if you stand where the lamp hits the empty middle of it, you can still see the lane through the heart.