A woman in a grey t-shirt with a black anatomical heart balloon print shows a colour traditional portrait tattoo of a woman with a hair bun on her forearm.

Woman portrait tattoo on forearm with heart print tee

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The photo is cropped below the face and centres on a grey t-shirt printed with a black-line anatomical heart drawn as a hot air balloon, with a small basket and figure beneath. A colour traditional-style tattoo of a woman's head with a hair bun sits on the outside of the right forearm, with bold outlines and flat fills. A darker tattoo is partly visible on the left upper arm beneath the shirt sleeve.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Hair bun Heart Hot air balloon Anatomy T-shirt Basket

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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 bellringer of Carrow Vale sends word up at dawn that the wind has turned south, and you are the only one in the kingdom who still knows how to bind a basket to a heart. Your grandmother did it with copper wire and a stolen tailor's needle, and she never let the valley folk see the stitching. You do the same, pulling the last knot tight on the lantern-hung cradle while the balloon, a great bladder of oiled silk, shivers above the square.

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The heart is the old kind, the one the physicians in Ostmere keep in jars. Its chambers are sewn from lamp-black ribbon, and it breathes when the burner is lit, lifting with each slow pulse. Passengers climb in and sit very still, as if they might upset the pump. Last week the queen's cartographer went up with a sextant and came down weeping about the view of the salt flats.

Today's passenger is a woman with her dark hair pinned up in a bun and a brass comb through it, a face you have seen painted on the sailors' forearms in the harbour taverns. She tells you she wants to see where the river goes when it stops being a river. You say the wind will decide that, not you, and she laughs, bold as a sign-painter's red.

The heart rises over the rooftops with its little basket swinging like a pendulum. Below, the bells stop. Nobody in Carrow Vale has ever seen the sea from above, and when the cloud parts she grips the rim and says, nearly to herself, that it looks exactly like the inside of a shell. You tie off the rope and keep your eyes on the burner, because that is the job, and because you are not sure your own heart can stand the view.