Pencil drawing of a tribal-style heart with interlocking swirling lines and soft grey shading, being sketched on white paper with a yellow pencil.

Tribal heart design drawn in pencil

Black and grey · Flash

A hand holds a yellow pencil beside a pencil drawing of a heart formed from interlocking tribal-style bands, with long tapering flourishes extending upwards and downwards. The linework is dark and bold, with soft grey shading along one side of each band to suggest depth. The design sits centred on a plain white sheet against a light brown backdrop.

Heart Tribal Swirl Design Pencil drawing Sketch

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

By the third week of frost, the seal of Morrow had been drawn forty-one times on my table, and forty-one times the bands had come out wrong. Queen Ilse wanted a heart knotted from two ribbons that never crossed, and the old engraver's rule was that each band must pass over and under the other exactly once. I kept my pencils sharpened to a needle and my lamp turned low so the shadows would fall where the grain of the paper told them to.

Keep reading

On the forty-second attempt I stopped trying to make the bands obey and watched them instead. The left band rose from the lower curl like a fishing line tightening; the right one swept up from the point and ran out past the edge of the sheet. Where they met, the eye could not say which had been there first. I shaded only the underside of each loop, the way the sea shades a bell buoy, and the whole thing lifted off the page.

The queen came down to the workroom at dusk with her two daughters, who had been quarrelling about a hair ribbon since breakfast. She held the drawing up to the window and was quiet for so long that the younger girl began to tug her sleeve. Then Ilse laid one finger on the crossing and said the knot was honest because neither band had been made to lose.

She ordered the seal cut that week. I still have the forty-first sheet, folded in my breast pocket, its corners worn soft from handling, and I have never once been able to say which of the two flourishes I drew first.