Neo-trad tattoo of a shaded red heart with grey winged wings, black swirling vines and a small ladybird, on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged red heart with swirls on the back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A red heart with a glossy shaded highlight sits at the centre, with outlined grey feathered wings spreading from either side. Black swirling vine lines curl above and below the heart, and a small red ladybird with a black outline sits near the lower tip. The heart is coloured in solid red with soft shading, while the wings use grey shading with bold black outlines.

Neo-trad Back Heart Wing Swirl Vine Ladybird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the years after the seed ships went quiet, the people of Lowmoor kept a red heart in a jar on the sill of the grain hall. Nobody living remembered who had made it. Old Maud Tennick said it had come down from the high dish with the first hard winter, and that it had wings because it had once been a bird's heart, or a bird that had once been a heart. She said a great many things, most of them on Sundays.

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When the river froze black in the eleventh year, Tamsin Aske was sent up the ridge with a sack of salt and a question for the ones who lived under the dish. She carried the heart wrapped in wool inside her coat, because the grain hall was cold and Maud said it would not last otherwise. Halfway up, a ladybird landed on her cuff, red as a coal, and would not be shaken off. It walked the black vine stitching at her wrist as though someone had drawn it the way to go.

The ones under the dish were not what the stories said. They were three old women mending a lamp with wire and patience, and they took the salt without thanks and looked at the heart for a long time. Then the eldest told Tamsin that the wings were not for flying. They were for shelter, so the heart could be carried far without going cold, and the curling lines were for finding the way back to whoever had sent it.

Tamsin walked down in the dusk with the ladybird still on her sleeve. When she set the heart back on the sill, the lamplight caught its glossy place, and the small beetle crept to the lower tip, opened its wings, and lifted off towards the ridge. The whole village turned to watch it go, and Maud Tennick, for once, said nothing at all.