Small heart tattoo with a black outline and pink, purple and blue diagonal stripes on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Striped heart tattoo on wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small heart sits on the inner wrist, outlined in solid black with a flat fill. The fill is split into pink, purple and blue bands running diagonally from upper right to lower left. The colour is bold and even against the pale skin, with the plain background kept out of focus.

Forearm Heart Stripe

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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

Past the last petrol station at Sallow Wells, where the road gave up being a road and became a long grey argument with the sand, a woman named Orla Dune kept a sign shop in a tin hut. She painted the mileposts for the county, and nobody else would take the job, because the wind took the paint off faster than she could put it on.

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One spring a lorry driver stopped and asked her for something he could not quite name. He wanted a marker for the bend where his brother had gone off the road, and he did not want a cross. He wanted something that said the bend was known. Orla thought about it for three days. She had pink from a tin of enamel meant for cattle gates, a purple she had mixed herself from red and blue, and a blue the colour of the deep end of the reservoir up north, which she had been keeping in case somebody asked for it.

She painted the three bands inside a heart as wide as a dinner plate, with black around the edge, and bolted it to the post with the bolts she used for road signs. The pink sat high and the blue sat low, and the purple ran between them like something that had decided to stay in the middle. The wind did not take it. Orla went back every year to touch up the edge where the sun had lifted it.

Years later, drivers stopped at that bend without being asked and left stones at the foot of the post in a neat row, one per driver, each a different colour. Orla never asked them why. She kept the paint topped up and the bolts tight, and when strangers came through and wanted to know what the heart was for, she told them to look at the stripes and decide for themselves.