Flash sheet of ten black tribal-style heart designs on a white background, each built from swirls, dots and linework, with no body placement shown.

Ten tribal heart designs on a flash sheet

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of ten heart-shaped designs drawn in solid black on white. Each heart is filled with ornamental swirls, spirals, dots, leaf-like forms and small inner hearts, with bold tribal-style shapes and fine detail. The hearts are arranged in rows with generous spacing, and all use black ink only.

Blackwork Dotwork Heart Swirl Spiral Dot Leaf Flourish Tribal Ornament

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

Mags Tenby had been cutting stencils at the back of the village hall since the frost came early, and the sheet of hearts had arrived in a brown envelope with no return address. Ten hearts, black on white, each one crowded with spirals like shavings curling off a plane. She laid them out on the trestle beside the gas ring and counted the small hearts hidden inside: three in one, five in another, none at all in the ninth.

Keep reading

The forest started at the bottom of the lane, where the beeches leaned over the wall and the postman refused to walk past after dark. Her brother Col had sent the sheet from the city, saying the lads at the bowling club wanted something for the spring fair stall, and that she should cut the best one as a sign. She chose the third, with its wave of dots running down the lines like rain down a window, and began on the first curl with a scalpel she kept sharp on a whetstone.

Somewhere past midnight the stove ticked and the lane went quiet. She noticed each small heart sat in a different place, as if someone had tucked them there to be found, and she spent the rest of the night tracing them with a pencil. The ninth heart had nothing inside it, only a spiral that ran in on itself and stopped.

By morning she had cut nine stencils and left the tenth board bare. She slid the sheet back into its envelope, wrote on the flap that the last one wanted filling, and walked it up to the post box before the beeches had shaken off the dew.