Design your heart tattoo to symbolize love for a person, item or place. Use a solid red heart with names or symbols inside. Create a design with two hearts to represent the love between two people. Color your tattoo with both traditional and nontraditional colors for hearts including red, white and pink. Choose an item or a place and have small hearts rising up, or encompass your original tattoo with a heart shape.
Take a heart design and cut it in half to symbolize heartbreak. Experiment with placing halves of the hearts on different areas of your body. Place one half on each side of your chest, each arm or each leg. Try the halves close together with varying degrees of space between them. Design your broken-heart tattoo with jagged, smooth or wavy edges. Utilize a photocopier to magnify or minimize your heart tattoo design and experiment with size as well as placement. Incorporate melting or cracking in the design to create the appearance of a broken heart. Create an addition to the design such as a hammer or flame to create the illusion that your heart has broken.
Remind yourself of where you have been and where you are headed. Design your heart to reflect a transition in your life. Create a tattoo that you can add on to at another transition in your life. Build on your design by adding new hearts or layers around the initial heart. Tattoo initials of your children's name or dates they were born inside each heart.
Use a picture of a real human heart to depict healing, health or life. Add stitches or Band-Aids to represent healing. Find a poem or words that you live by and depict the words being pumped in and out like arteries or veins. Drip blood from the heart or put a heart inside the mouth of an animal for a gory heart tattoo.