Traditional style tattoo of a tooth inside an oval frame with red flowers, a pink heart and a red bow, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tooth in a frame with flowers and bow

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tooth sits in the centre of an ornate oval frame decorated with beads, a small pink heart at the top and two red flowers. A large red bow hangs from the base of the frame. The tooth is outlined in black with grey shading, while the flowers, bow and leaves use bold red, orange and green fills. The tattoo is shown on the forearm against a dark padded surface.

Traditional Forearm Frame Flower Heart Bow Bead Leaves

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

Your grandfather pulled teeth for a living in Hull, and he did it on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays were when the fair set up in the Market Place and the farm lads came in with their jaws swollen like plums. He had a chair with one leg mended in wire and a tin of pliers that rang when you shook it. Nobody paid him in coin if they could help it. They paid in what they had: a hen, a bolt of cloth, once a clock that never kept the right hour.

Keep reading

One November a boy came in holding his cheek, no older than you are now, and he would not open his mouth. Grandfather saw the tooth was black at the root and said so plainly. The boy had no money and no hen. He asked instead for the oval frame hanging on the back wall, the one with the beads, which had belonged to Grandfather's mother and held nothing but dust. Grandfather said the frame was not for trading. Then he looked at the boy's mother, who had walked four miles through the sleet, and he took the tooth out anyway, quick as a cork from a bottle.

The boy went home with his cheek packed in cloth. The tooth, which had been a nuisance in its owner's head, went into the frame in the middle of the velvet, with a red bow tied beneath it and two paper poppies from the fair pushed in at the top. Grandfather said a thing that hurt you enough to be pulled ought to be kept somewhere it could be admired.

Years later the boy came back, grown and bearded, with a tobacco tin full of coppers he had been saving. He stood in the doorway a long while looking at the frame. Then he asked whether the tooth was still his. Grandfather said it had never belonged to anyone but the frame, and the boy laughed until he coughed, and that was the end of the debt.