Pencil sketch of an ornate heart formed from curling scrollwork and leaves, a design suitable as a black and grey tattoo flash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirled heart with leaves and vines

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a heart made from looping scrolls, with stems and leaves sprouting from the lower curves and the top right. Small dots are scattered around the outline and the shading is soft graphite on a pale textured background. The composition is centred and vertical, with the scrolls providing the main linework.

Botanical Heart Leaves Vine Scroll Swirl Sketch

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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

Frank Doyle had swept the sprung maple floor of the Palais every Saturday for nineteen years, and he knew the dance cards by their smudges. The pink ones came from the Sunday church crowd who never waltzed past the second bar. The blue ones belonged to the sailors off the Gosport ferry, who tore them into confetti when the band played its last number.

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This one was tucked under the radiator behind the bandstand, a cream card folded once. Inside, in soft pencil, someone had drawn a heart made of scrolls. Each loop curled back on itself like a fern unrolling, and from the lower points stems ran out and sprouted leaves with veins pressed in so lightly he could barely see them. A few dots had been flicked across the margin, as though the artist had shaken the pencil at the end.

He turned it over. There was nothing on the back but a name, Ada, and a time, half past ten, written in a hand that pressed too hard on the d. He asked Ada Pryce at the ticket table on Monday. She went pink, then pale, and said her sister had drawn it during the blackout, when the hall was dark and they danced by the glow of one torch. Her sister had meant to draw the whole ballroom one day, every couple on the floor, every ribbon. She had only managed the heart.

Frank pinned the card above the cloakroom hatch, where the coats hung. On Saturday night, when the band struck up and couples swung past in a blur of skirts, he caught himself curling the handle of his broom round in slow loops, keeping time without meaning to. The last thing he swept that night was a single leaf of dust, curled tight at its edges, and he left it lying where it was.