Traditional style flash sheet of red and black heart designs, including a dagger through a heart, a rose with a MOM banner, and swallows with LOVE ALWAYS lettering.

Traditional heart flash sheet

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A white flash sheet of traditional heart designs drawn in bold black outlines and solid red fills. The designs include a dagger through a heart, a rose with a MOM banner, a padlock heart reading TAKEN, a broken heart, arrows, swallows and several lettered banners. Dots and small stars are scattered between the motifs, and the designs are spaced out evenly across the sheet.

Traditional Heart Dagger Rose Swallow Arrow Padlock Banner Lettering Flower Key Dot Star

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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

Nell had the flash folder sorted before the kettle boiled, because her uncle had always said nothing went back on the wall until it had been checked against the book. Sixty-odd designs in red and black, sheet by sheet, and the padlock heart kept slipping under her thumb. TAKEN, it said across the banner, with a pair of little wings tucked behind the O. Someone had cut a key out of the paper corner and pinned it back in the wrong place.

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Desmond never explained the key. He talked about the dagger heart the way other men talked about horses, and he'd bought the arrowed sweetheart off a sailor in Gravesend who swore it was older than the dagger. Nell opened the ledger on the counter. Names in one column, prices in shillings, and beside an entry from the spring of 1987 his small square hand: Ruth, key kept, don't frame it.

She held the sheet up to the window. The swallows were the last thing she looked at, banner curled under them, LOVE ALWAYS in letters traced so often the paper had gone soft. His note at the foot of the page said only: swallows for the ones who come back. She suspected it meant nothing at all, and that was the sort of thing he would have liked to hear her say.

The bell over the door went. A man stood on the mat holding a folded envelope, damp at the corners, and he looked at the wall as if someone had told him where to find something. Nell slid the pin out of the padlock heart, put the paper key in her apron pocket, and asked him what he wanted done.