Traditional style colour tattoo of a heart with a scalloped border, a hand holding a small sprig and leaves above, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional heart with hand and sprig

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A heart sits at the centre of the design, framed by a red and yellow outline, a dotted border and a scalloped lace edge, with a hand holding a sprig inside it. Leaves in red and grey rise from the top of the heart. The bold black outlines and solid fills of red, yellow and skin tone give the piece a classic flash look against a dark background.

Traditional Upper arm Heart Hand Sprig Leaves Dot

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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 rain had been coming sideways down the market since eight, and Nell Garvey had given up pretending the awning kept it out. She wiped the marble counter with her sleeve and checked the tin of sprigs: rosemary, bay, and a few stems of lily she'd bought off a man in Ashford who swore they were fresh. Across the aisle the ribbon seller had already packed up, leaving bolts of lace to darken at the edges in the wet.

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At half past eleven a boy came in under the awning with a folded paper heart in his fist, creased soft from being carried. He said his gran had drawn it on the back of an old gas bill, a hand holding a sprig with a lace border round it, and could Nell make it into something that would stay dry. She turned the paper over. The pencil was faint, the fingers too long, but the sprig was held the way a person holds a thing they mean to give away.

Nell had a brass stamp her father had cut in a Sheffield workshop forty years before, its edge scalloped like a doily. She inked it, pressed it round the heart, dotted the inner ring with the point of a nail, and laid a rosemary sprig where the pencil hand had been. The boy watched the rain bead on the counter and asked whether it would hold. She said nothing held for ever, but lace held better than most.

When she gave it back the ink was still tacky. He tucked it inside his coat and ran for the bus shelter. Nell found the stub of pencil the gran had left behind and, in the corner of the gas bill, a second small drawing she hadn't noticed: the same hand, now empty. She pinned the paper to the awning pole where the rain couldn't reach it, and went back to the lilies.