Heart Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a heart tattoo means

The heart is the most-tattooed symbol in the world and the one that most rewards a specific version. A plain heart says love and nothing more; every meaningful heart tattoo is made specific by what is done to it — a banner, a dagger, a flame, a break, an anatomical rendering.

The Sacred Heart is a defined Catholic image, not a decorative one: a heart crowned with thorns, pierced, aflame, sometimes bleeding, representing Christ's love and suffering together. It is widely worn by people outside the faith who like the imagery, and it is worth knowing it is legible as devotional to anyone raised in it.

The anatomical heart is a deliberate correction of the symbolic one, and it has become the more common choice among people who find the classic shape sentimental. It says love is a working organ rather than an idea — messier, more physical, and dependent on maintenance. The two versions read as almost opposite in tone.

A broken heart, a stitched heart or a heart with a lock all say something more precise than love: loss, repair, or something guarded. The stitched heart in particular has become a quiet standard for surviving grief, and it is a better image for that than most people expect.

Where the design comes from

The symmetrical heart shape has no clear origin — the silphium seedpod and stylised ivy leaves are both proposed and neither is settled — but it was fixed as the symbol for love by European heraldry and playing cards by the fifteenth century. The Sacred Heart devotion was formalised in the seventeenth century following Margaret Mary Alacoque's visions in France, which is why its iconography is so specific. In tattooing, the banner-and-heart is one of the oldest American traditional compositions there is, and predates almost everything else in a flash sheet.

Choosing yours

• A plain heart works at almost any size, which is a real advantage — it is a simple closed shape with no fine internal detail, so it survives ink spread better than nearly anything else. An anatomical heart is the opposite: vessels, chambers and texture are exactly what merges, and it wants 10 cm or more.
• Banners are the thing to plan rather than add. A heart drawn to carry a name has a different shape and proportion from one drawn alone, and squeezing lettering into an existing heart afterwards is the most common reason one has to be reworked.
• It is a symmetrical shape, so a flat field keeps it honest — chest, inner forearm, the flat of the shoulder. On a strongly curved placement one lobe foreshortens and the shape reads slightly off in every photograph.

Common questions