Traditional style tattoo of a red heart with teal-shaded dark green leaves and a cream banner with black lettering, on the forearm.

Traditional heart with banner on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red heart with a black outline sits across the forearm, with a cream banner curling over its centre bearing bold black capital lettering. Two dark green leaves with teal shading extend from either side of the heart. The solid red fill, bold black linework and flat colour are typical of traditional American tattooing, set against a pink fabric background.

Traditional Forearm Heart Banner Leaves Lettering

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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

Sit yourself down on that coil of rope, you'll not get a better seat on this boat. You want the story of the heart Dolly Marsh had painted on the cabin of the Persistence, the summer the cut froze solid at Stanwick? Right. She was a lock-keeper's daughter, quick as a heron, and she'd been promised to a horse dealer from Lichfield who had more coin than sense.

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Her mother said yes, the dealer said yes, and Dolly said nothing at all for three weeks, which frightened the lot of them more than any shouting would. Then one grey morning she went down to the wharf with a pot of red paint and a brush she'd made from the tail of the cat. She painted a heart on the side of that barge, big as a cartwheel. Beneath it she painted a cream ribbon curling like a sleeping snake, and across the ribbon, copying the letters from a Bible her grandmother kept under the bed, she wrote the two words the whole towpath still won't repeat in company.

Now here's the turn of it. The horse dealer came down the path that afternoon, read the ribbon, and laughed so hard he slipped off the edge and went in the cut up to his waistcoat. The lock-keeper's wife laughed too, and then the whole village did, and by Michaelmas nobody in Stanwick could say that dealer's name without a snort. Dolly kept her heart and painted it fresh every spring. When she died the barge went to her nephew, who still sails under that banner, and if you ask him kindly he'll tell you the leaves were her idea.