Black tribal-style design of a heart outline with two curled spiral motifs facing each other, shown as a drawing on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal heart with twin spirals

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black heart outline forms the frame, with two spiral scroll shapes curling inward from the upper lobes and dotted circles at their centres. The linework is solid, thick and uniform, with tapered tails that run down to a point at the base of the heart. The design is entirely black on white, with no shading and no body part visible.

Heart Spiral Scroll Tribal 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

Sit closer, the fire wants feeding and so do you. My mother's mother told me this one, and she had it from a woman who sold pots at the crossroads market below the salt flats, where the road forks three ways and nobody agrees which is the right one.

Keep reading

There was a carver in that town called Ysolde Marr, who could not sleep unless her hands were busy. She cut two spirals into a single piece of heartwood, one curling in from each side, and when she turned the board over she saw that the spirals were looking at each other the way two gulls look across a harbour before deciding to fly. She sanded the lobes of the heart until they were smooth as river stones, then she painted the dots at the centre of each scroll with soot and egg, one dot at a time, counting them aloud. Seven on the left. Seven on the right. She never told anyone why seven.

The board hung above the door of her shop for thirty winters. Travellers who came up from the coast would stop and trace the thick black tail that ran down to a single point, and they would ask her what it meant. She would say it was a door that opened only if you came at it from both sides. Most laughed. One did not. He came back the next spring with a second board, carved from the same tree, and the two of them fitted together at the tails with no glue at all.

I have never seen those boards. Nobody living has. But the market woman swore that if you hold a black heart up to a lamp on the shortest night, the two spirals will turn slowly toward each other, the way they did in Ysolde's hands, and you will hear her counting under her breath.