Traditional style heart tattoo with a scalloped top, black outline and orange-red shading, on a forearm, with partial tattoos visible around it.

Traditional heart on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A heart with a scalloped, dotted top edge and a central stem-like line dividing the design, outlined in bold black. The heart is filled with orange-red shading on its upper halves and bands of grey stippled shading lower down. Partial tattoos in red, blue and black surround it on the forearm against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Heart Dot Scallop Arrow Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had hoed the bed under the south wall for three springs before the heart-shaped seed came up through the sorrel. Its leaves were scalloped at the edge, like the frill on a christening cap, and a row of dark dots ran along the rim where the dew sat and would not run off.

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The village said it was a love plant and ought to be pulled. Old Mrs Pell said a plant that split down its middle would only bear fruit when both halves agreed to it. So Tomas watered it at dusk and told it about the weather and the price of salt, and the halves swelled and drew back and swelled again, while the stem between them thickened into a root you could see pale through the soil.

In the autumn the fruit came, red-orange on the upper halves and grey and ribbed below where the frost had touched it. He carried it into the kitchen on a plate. His sister Ada looked at it for a long time, set down her knife, and said the thing about the pear tree that they had both agreed to forget. They ate it in silence, half each, and the stem stayed in the bowl, forked and pale.

The next spring a line of green arrows ran from the wall to the gate, though neither of them had sown anything there. Ada followed it with a trowel and came back with two seeds in her palm, one for each of them. Tomas planted his by the wall and said nothing, and that year the halves of his heart grew together without any help from him.