Traditional style colour tattoo of a red heart with a banner reading FUCK THAT, framed by yellow flowers and green and black spikes, on an upper arm.

Traditional heart with banner and flowers

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A red heart wrapped in a yellow-edged banner that reads FUCK THAT sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by yellow flowers with white highlights and black and green pointed leaves. The linework is bold and black, with solid colour fills and some shading on the leaves. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against plain skin, with part of another dark tattoo visible at the right edge.

Traditional Upper arm Heart Banner Lettering Flower Leaves Spike

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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

The generator coughs twice before the Waltzer lights stutter on, and you are already late for the tent. Blue spirit slops in the tin, the needles soak, and Mrs Ada Pell sits on the folding stool with one palm flat on the trestle, as if someone might ask her to leave it there. She wants a heart. Everyone who sits down on a fairground stool wants a heart, and you have drawn a hundred since the field at Kettering filled up in April.

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You offer her the old flash your master pinned above the chair in 1979: a red heart, a ruff of yellow blooms with white highlights, black spikes thrown out behind like a crown nobody asked for. Ada squints at the banner across the middle. 'Leave that empty,' she says. 'I'll tell you what it says when I'm ready.' You work the spikes first, then shade the leaves from green into black, filling each petal while the carousel groans round over your shoulder.

The generator dies halfway through the second bloom. In the dark, with only your torch clamped under your chin, Ada starts talking. Two words, low and flat, nothing you would ever print on a poster for the shooting gallery. You ink them while the ribbon curls round the heart the way she describes it, and by the time the lights come back the needle has gone quiet.

She checks it in the hand mirror, nods once, and pays in coins still warm from her pocket. Then she walks out past the candyfloss stall into the rain. You wipe down the stool and look at the old flash still pinned to the canvas, its banner blank, and understand that you were never going to be the one who filled it.