Pencil sketch of a winged heart with a banner wrapped around it, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged heart with banner sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a heart with a feathered wing on each side and a ribbon or banner curling around its lower half. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft grey shading on the heart and the wing feathers. The design sits centred on a pale sheet of paper, with a faint diagonal crease running across the top left corner.

Heart Wing Banner Ribbon

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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

Dessa had been staring at the same sheet of paper since the second bell, and the sorting hall had gone quiet around her except for the hum of the pneumatic drums. It had come up from the surface in a sealed tube marked UNDELIVERABLE, a flat square of heavy cartridge paper with a heart drawn on it in pencil. Two feathered wings sprouted from its top corners, and a ribbon curled round its lower half, its loops shaded soft as breath on glass.

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Nobody printed things like that any more. Every letter on Quill Station arrived as light on a slate, with a routing stamp and a cold little checksum. Pencil was for children and old men, and this had clearly been drawn by someone who pressed hard and then rubbed the shadows back in with a thumb. A faint crease ran across the top left corner, as if the sheet had been folded once and smoothed out again, carefully, by someone who did not want to lose it.

She carried it down to the archive at the end of her shift. Old Hale, who had catalogued the drums since before the lattice went up, took one look and laughed. "Winged hearts were how the first runners marked a parcel that had to fly," he said. "Wings for speed, ribbon for the seal. But the banner's blank." He tapped the empty curl with a fingernail. "Whoever sent it never got as far as the name."

Dessa took a pencil from the rack by the door. She wrote one word on the ribbon, carefully, the way the drawing had been made, then fed the sheet into the tube for the surface. It clicked into the line and was gone, and for a moment the ribbon was the only thing she could see on the screen, its pale loops now holding her handwriting: Marren.