Black ink line drawing of a winged heart with a faceted gem centre, surrounded by mandala-style flowers and a small crescent moon, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Winged heart with mandala design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on white paper shows a heart with feathered wings at its sides, a faceted gem set in its centre, and a crescent moon above. Layered mandala-style flowers with dotted and striped petals fill the space around the heart. The linework is solid black with fine hatching and dotwork detail, and the design is shown without colour.

Geometric Heart Wing Mandala Crescent moon Gem Flower

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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 lace pattern book smells of damp wool and the candle wax your mother dripped on it every winter, and you turn past the rows of bobbin roses until you reach the page she never let you copy. A heart sits in the middle of it, wings spread at either side like a bird that has forgotten how to land, and above it a crescent moon no bigger than a fingernail. Around the heart she has worked mandalas of petals, each one counted in pins.

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The village below the wood lost its bell-ringer in March, and since then the lacemakers have sat in the church porch in the mornings, because the light is better there and nobody wants to be alone with the trees. Old Mrs Pelling says the pattern came from a peddler who walked the forest road with a box of glass beads and no name. She says he sold one bead to your mother for a single cut of thread, and that the bead was the faceted blue of a frozen pond.

You cannot find that bead anywhere in the cottage. You search the tin of buttons, the drawer of hooks, the hem of the Sunday cloak. On the seventh night you wake to a sound like a moth against glass and find the moon-marked page open on the table, a single pin laid across the heart's centre, and the wind pushing at the shutter from the wood.

You stitch the wings first, because your mother always did, and then you set a bead in the centre of the heart where the pin was. It catches the lamp and throws a small cold star across the lace. In the morning the porch is full of women asking after the candle, and you tell them the pattern is finished, which is the first lie you have ever told in this village, and the only one she would have approved of.