Songfacts®:

• Ariana wrote this song with The Rascals, Antonio Dixon and Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds. Her inspiration was a tattoo that she'd just got on her toe in a shape of a heart.
• Country star Ronnie Dunn covered "Tattooed Heart" for the title track of his 2016 album, re-imagining it as a country song. It was the Nashville star's daughter who suggested the song choice while she was interning at the publishing arm of Big Machine Label Group. Unsure at first, Dunn recorded his version in secret. "I didn't tell anybody I was cutting it. I just snuck back and did it," he admitted to Billboard magazine. "I thought I'd crash and burn on my own without anybody hearing it.
• Ariana Grande wrote the original song in her room alone in 2010 when she was just 17 years old. When she started work on Yours Truly, she showed it to Matt Squire, who'd been recruited to help guide production. He had previously worked on Grande's debut single, "Put Your Hearts Up," as well as 3OH!3's second album, Want. In February 2012, Squire invited the 3OH!3 guys to join Grande for a couple of days in the studio.
  
  3OH!3's Sean Foreman brainstormed fresh ideas within his Notes app. Among these ideas were lines that captured the essence of a classic teenage love story. The next day, his 3OH!3 partner Nathaniel Motte was running late, so Foreman took her through his Notes app, rapid-fire style. "She was like, 'Oh, that's really cool. I like the tattooed-heart idea,'" he recalled to The Insider.