Two small black heart tattoos made of fingerprint ridges, one on the top of a foot and one on a lower leg near the ankle.

Two fingerprint hearts on ankles

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two small heart shapes sit on bare skin, each filled with fine concentric fingerprint-like ridges rather than solid ink. The upper heart sits on the top of a foot and the lower one sits on the ankle or shin, with the heart points angled in different directions. The image is in black ink only, with soft natural light and a plain, neutral background.

Ankle Heart Fingerprint

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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 Palais in Hastings smelled of Brylcreem and wet wool the night Eileen Marsh and Dennis Cooke came up to my ticket table asking for the stamping pad. I was sixteen and bored, minding the till while Mr Hollis fetched the band's second crate of lemonade. Dennis went red to the ears and said they wanted to leave a mark, something daft they could keep.

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He took Eileen's left thumb and rolled it across the pad, then pressed it onto the back of the ticket stub she had tucked in her purse. Then his own. His prints came out lopsided, the way thumbs do when a lad is nervous, the ink smeared thick on one side. Eileen laughed and said his whorls looked like a bad perm. They set the two marks side by side and angled them so the loops ran toward each other, and when they lifted their hands the ridges curled into two small hearts, pointing different ways, nearly touching.

They danced until the band packed up and I never thought about them again until a wet Tuesday years later, when Eileen stood at the bus stop on Queens Road with a carrier bag and a face I half knew. She was a widow by then. She showed me the stub, soft as cloth, the two smudges still sitting there. The ink had gone into the card so deep it would outlast us both.

I kept the ticket book in my drawer afterwards. Mr Hollis's pad has dried to a grey crust now, but when I open the book the thumbs are still pressed face to face, as if they only stepped away from each other a moment ago.