Black linework flash design of a traditional-style heart pierced by a dagger, with dripping drops, flowers and leaves around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional dagger-pierced heart with flowers

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil or ink drawing of a tattoo design showing a heart pierced by a dagger, with three teardrop drops below and a flower with leaves at the upper left. Leaves also sprout from the right side and base of the heart, and a small bird-like shape sits on the heart. The bold outlines are drawn in dark ink with no shading or colour, set against a warm tan background.

Traditional Heart Dagger Flower Leaves Drop Bird

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 robin landed on the gatepost before I had the kettle on, which was how I knew it had come out of the forest and not up the road. Nothing from the road sits still that long. I had been waiting since Michaelmas for word from Ned, who went into the trees with the charcoal burners and did not walk out with them.

Keep reading

Mrs Harker from the lower cottage said the burners had struck a dead ash and come home without him. She said it the way you'd mention the price of salt. I didn't believe her, and I didn't believe the bird either, but the bird had a scrap of oilcloth tied to one leg, and the knot was the sailor's hitch Ned's father taught him before the pit took him.

I picked the knot loose with my teeth. Inside was a strip of paper pressed flat, with three dots of rust-red ink in a row like drops from a cut. Under them, in his square hand, it said: Heart still beating. Keep the lamp lit on the eve. The lamp in my window had burned every night since he left, and the neighbours thought me soft for it.

I lit it again that night and sat up with the kettle going cold. Near midnight the robin came back and perched on the sill, breast puffed against the frost. Beside it lay a folded ash leaf pinned with a black thorn, and I knew the thorn from the hedge behind the forge where he used to cut his fingers. I pressed the leaf flat under my palm and did not open the door, because I had learned the trees keep their promises best when nobody asks them to hurry.