Colour tattoo on an upper arm of a green tent among pine trees under a starry sky, with the words Home is where your heart is arched above and below it, in a traditional style.

Tent and pine trees with lettering on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a green tent set among dark pine trees beneath a shaded night sky with small stars. The words HOME IS WHERE YOUR HEART IS are written in bold dark block lettering, arched above and below the scene. Solid green fill and touches of red on the ground sit against black outlines and grey shading in the sky.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Tent Pine tree Star Night sky Camping Lettering Quote Landscape

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

The seed-ships had long since stopped coming to Ardmor, and the pines the first settlers planted in the red dust had grown tall enough to hold the wind. Sefa's grandmother said the old people carried a saying across the black between the stars, and that it was written on the side of every tent they ever pitched. Nobody living had seen the writing, so the saying was passed mouth to mouth, worn smooth like a river stone.

Keep reading

When the Council decided the forest belonged to the mill and the new hall would stand on the high clearing, Sefa went up the ridge with her father's green tent rolled under her arm. The mill men laughed at her. They said a tent was no kind of house. She pegged it out between two trunks anyway, where the ground was soft with needles, and she lay inside through the long dark while the sky above the canopy filled with the cold white of the far stars.

Each night someone different came up the path. A surveyor's boy with blistered feet, a widow carrying a pot of stew, a mill foreman who had not slept since his wife died. They asked if they could sit in the lee of the canvas, and she said yes, and they talked until the stars moved across the gap in the branches. Nobody asked about the saying. They only said it back to her, one by one, slowly, as though testing its weight.

When the hall went up the following spring, the Council found the clearing full of tents and nobody willing to leave. The mill was moved down to the valley. Sefa's tent stayed folded at the foot of her bed for the rest of her life. In her last summer she gave it to a boy who could not sleep, showed him how to tie the guy ropes, and left the flap open so the stars could look in.