Broken Heart Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a broken heart tattoo means

A plain heart says love and stops there. A broken one has a before and an after, and the drawing decides which you are wearing. A crack left open, like the minimalist zigzag or the dotwork heart split by a white line, is the wound in the present. Stitches, a sticking plaster, a thread tying the halves or a padlock across the break are repair, which puts it in the past. A flower growing from the crack, or a bird escaping a heart of stone, is what came out of it.

Who broke it is the second question. A crack from inside reads as grief, and plenty are worn for a death rather than a breakup. A dagger through the break points at someone else, which is why the traditional dagger heart reads as betrayal, and a heart that cracks while it burns is a love that used itself up. A heart of glass broke because it was fragile. A heart of stone broke although it was hard, and that difference is worth choosing.

The anatomical version has a literal edge. Doctors in Japan described takotsubo cardiomyopathy in 1990, a sudden weakening of the heart muscle brought on by severe stress or grief, now widely called broken heart syndrome; the name is the octopus trap that the stricken ventricle resembles. It is usually temporary, but it gives a cracked anatomical heart a weight the cartoon shape does not have.

Kintsugi turns the story round. The Japanese craft mends broken pottery with lacquer and powdered gold, tracing the repair in the most valuable material on the object instead of hiding it, and the anatomical heart here mended in gold makes the same argument: the break is part of the history, not something to disguise. Halves shared between two people argue the opposite, since each means something only beside the other.

Where the design comes from

The broken heart is older in words than in pictures. The King James Bible of 1611 has "He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds" in Psalm 147, which reads now like a description of the stitched heart. Catholic art supplied the blades: Our Lady of Sorrows is painted with seven swords in her heart, after the prophecy in Luke that a sword would pierce her soul. Frida Kahlo painted the anatomical version in The Two Fridas in 1939, the year of her divorce from Diego Rivera, both hearts exposed and joined by one blood vessel.

Choosing yours

• Choose the tense before the style. An open crack, a mended one and a heart with something growing through it are three different statements, and every style here, from the loose sketch to the filigree halves, can carry any of them. That decision is yours to bring.
• The crack is negative space, and negative space closes. A white line through a solid heart depends on bare skin staying bare, and as ink spreads a hairline gap fills until the heart looks whole again. Make it at least two or three millimetres wide on a small piece, or move the halves apart as the blackwork and puzzle hearts do.
• For the kintsugi heart, ask how the gold will be done. No tattoo ink shines like metal, so gold is built from yellows, ochres and white highlights, and it only reads as gold with dark lines beside it.

Common questions