Traditional style tattoo of a red heart with a yellow NOTHANKS banner, yellow flowers and dark green leaves on the lower leg.

Traditional heart with NOTHANKS banner and flowers

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A red heart sits across the centre of the design, wrapped by a yellow banner reading NOTHANKS in black capitals. Two yellow flowers with white highlights sit behind it, flanked by dark green and black pointed leaves. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat colour fills and the design centred on a pale, lightly haired lower leg against a blue paper backdrop.

Traditional Calf Heart Banner Text Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

Pull your collars up, the rain's coming off the river sideways and I've only got the one good voice left in me, so stand in close. This is the tale of Nell Pardoe and the heart on her awning, the one that would not be given anything at all.

Keep reading

Nell sold bootlaces, boot blacking and pin badges under a striped tarp at the bottom of Tanner's Yard, every Saturday for forty years. Above her trestle she nailed a painted board: a red heart with a yellow ribbon across its middle and two yellow flowers tucked behind, as if they were trying to be polite. The ribbon read NOTHANKS in black capitals. It was there to stop the lads from the wharf pressing free apples on her, and the curate pressing tracts, and the fellow with the accordion pressing his tunes on everybody. Most people read it as a sign of a grumpy woman, and that suited Nell fine.

Then one wet March a man in a grey coat named Tobias Quill began stopping at her stall. He offered her a paper bag of pear drops, then a half crown, then his hand in marriage, and each time she looked up at the board and said the word for her. He laughed every time and came back the next Saturday. On the third week the drains backed up, the whole yard went under, and the water came over the tarp in a brown rush. Tobias carried her trestle to the steps without being asked, and she did not thank him. He left the pear drops on her step anyway.

Nell's board went down to the cellar with the rest of her stock, and I'm told it's still there, face up under an old mackintosh. Mind the step on your way out, the gutter's full.