Flash design of a pink heart pierced by a dagger wrapped in a snake, with bat-like wings and a skull above and a Without You banner below.

Snake and dagger heart with Without You banner

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A bold illustrated tattoo design showing a pink heart pierced by a dagger, with a snake coiled around the blade. A winged skull sits at the top, and a banner reading WITHOUT YOU runs across the lower part of the heart. The shading is smooth and dimensional, with a dark outline, and the purple, pink, green and gold tones are set against a plain grey background.

Neo-trad Heart Dagger Snake Skull Wing Banner Lettering

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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

Mary, the swell off Dogger Bank has been running in long grey ridges since Tuesday, and the skipper has had us hauling nets in the dark twice a day. Your letter came with the post boat at Lerwick, folded soft from being read on the wheelhouse step. Bill Tennant swears he could smell the lavender from across the whole deck, which is a lie, because Bill hasn't smelt a thing since his pneumonia.

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I've kept the little tin you packed, the one with the brass hinge. Inside is the sea glass from Cleethorpes and the pressed primrose from the back wall. The bosun caught me turning it over and asked what I was keeping in there. I said my heart, and he laughed until he had to sit on a fish box. He has a wife in Hartlepool who writes every Sunday, and he says the sea doesn't read letters, it only cares about the knot in your rope.

Last night Ray showed us the design he had done in Hull before he shipped out, a pink heart with a dagger through it and a snake wound up the blade, a winged skull keeping watch over the top and a banner with WITHOUT YOU stitched across the bottom. He said the blade is what holds the heart together, not what breaks it. I didn't believe him until the wind dropped and the gulls settled on the rail, and the sky turned the colour of the inside of a mussel shell, and I thought of your kitchen window with the light left on.

I'll be home by the first of the month if the weather holds. I'll bring kippers from the smokehouse at Brancaster that will make the whole terrace smell of me. Tell your mum I'm sorry about the chimney. Yours, with the tin in my pocket, Tom.