Traditional style tattoo of a solid black heart with a scalloped outline and pink and orange flowers with green leaves, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solid black heart with flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black heart with a scalloped white outline sits at the centre of the design, framed by pink and orange flowers and green leaves that curve around its upper edges. The black fill is smooth and dense, with bold dark outlines around the flowers and leaves. Colour is limited to the pink, orange and green petals and foliage against the black and pale skin, and the tattoo is centred on the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Heart Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Skerrow, the women said a heart left behind on the shore would hold a man's place until he came home. Nessa Dunmore's husband, Callum, had sailed for the herring grounds in March, and each morning she walked down to Hollin Cove to watch the point for sails. The old woman who kept the shop said nothing good came of waiting on the tide, but Nessa had no other use for her hands.

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She found a flat black slate on the shingle, smooth as a plate, and spent a week rubbing it with sand until it was shaped like a heart. She edged it with white shell broken and pressed into a row of small scallops, the way her mother edged christening linen. Then she packed wild red campion and orange marigolds against the top, with sea-holly leaves curling round them, and set the stone on a ledge above the tideline.

The boats came home in June, all but one. Callum's was found drifting past the skerries with the nets hauled and no one aboard. That evening Nessa went back to the cove and found her heart gone from its ledge, the flowers lying fresh on the wet sand below, though she had left them dry on the stone. Nobody on the island would say who had carried it down.

She stopped waiting on the tide after that. Each spring she carved another heart, and each morning she found the one before it turned to face the open water, the marigolds bright as they had been on the day she made them.