Black tribal-style drawing of a heart with swirling lines that flow down into an ankh cross, shown as a flash design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal heart and ankh design

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a heart at the top, drawn with bold, tapering black lines and a small solid dot at its upper left. Swirling strands run down from the heart and merge into a looped ankh-style cross at the base. The image is solid black ink on white with no shading or colour, and the design is centred with plenty of empty space around it.

Heart Ankh Cross Swirl Tribal

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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 down by the sundial, child, and mind the bees, they have had a poor summer. My grandmother's grandmother kept this garden at Haverleigh when the wall was still whole and the pears fed the whole parish. She had a gardener called Tobias Quill who came up from the coast with a sack of seed and a bad chest, and who could never keep his hands off the ironwork.

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The gate at the foot of the walk had a loop of iron worked above its latch, shaped like an old crossed key with a round head. Tobias said it meant life, and every spring he hung a bramble rope through it and twisted the rope into a heart, so the lane would know someone was still tending. Honeysuckle ran down from the heart and wound round the cross until nobody could say which was the plant and which the iron.

One February the frost took the pears in a single night. Tobias went out before light with a billhook and cut for three days, and the lantern moved up and down the wall like a slow pulse. When the squire came to dispute the rent, he found Tobias kneeling under the gate with his hands full of black stems, and beside him a small round bud, no bigger than a thumbprint, already open.

So if you want the heart to hold, you must give the gate something to climb. Pull the rope tight and mind your fingers. That is the whole lesson, and the bees agree with me.