Traditional style heart tattoo with a white DONE banner and dark leaves on the forearm, in red, orange and black ink.

Traditional heart with DONE banner on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red heart with an orange and black outline sits across a white banner that reads DONE, with dark leaves and red stems curving up and down beside it. The bold black outlines and flat red and orange shading are typical of the traditional style. The colour ink dominates against a soft, blurred blue and white background.

Traditional Forearm Heart Banner Leaves Flower Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The banner was the last thing on the bench, and Dilys Penhallow had been looking at its two wrong letters since breakfast. The D was fine. The O had drifted, the way her hand did after a bad night, and the N sat a hair too close to the E. Nobody else on Quay Street would notice. The boy from the chandlery would, and he was already in the doorway with his cap in his fists, asking whether it was done.

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"Done," she said, which was not the same as finished, and he took it anyway. Her father had taught her that a sign was done when the wind could not argue with it. Behind her on the wall hung the heart she had copied from the old pattern book, red as a pillar box, its orange edge gone brown at the corners. She had run the leaves up the side the way the herring girls once wore their hair, dark and close, with the red stems showing through like veins. Someone at the wedding would look at it and think it was only ornament.

The wedding was Saturday, at the chapel above the harbour, and the bride was the chandler's youngest, who had cried on the step when she saw the first draft and said it looked like something from before the war. Dilys had taken that as a compliment. She fixed the O with a fine liner, then sat a long time with the brush held over the paper.

When the boy had gone she lifted the banner off the bench and held it to the window. The letters were straight enough now. She dipped the finest brush in black and, under the banner's edge where no one would think to look, painted her own small mark: a single red bud on a thorn-thin stem. Then she wrote the date beneath it, and for once the ink did not run.