Fine line colour tattoo of amino acid chemical structures and an outlined heart on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Amino acid structures and heart on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A tattoo on the side of an ankle shows several chemical structure diagrams drawn in single-line strokes, with labels such as Cys, Tyr, Ile, Gln and Asn. A small outlined heart sits between the structures, and a chain of sulphur atoms joins two of the molecules. Each structure is inked in a different colour, including blue, pink, teal, orange and red, and the layout runs diagonally down the ankle.

Fine line Ankle Chemical structure Molecule Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the 6.14 is always late, it has a sulk on it. You want to hear about the chain? Right. Every bit of you is built from little folded things, proteins, long strings of beads that must fold into a shape before they're any use. Left alone they flop about like wet washing. What keeps them folded is a bond between two of the beads, two sulphur atoms that hold hands across the string. The beads with the sulphur tails are called cysteine, and the bond between them is a disulfide, which is a grand word for a handshake.

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Aldous Penhallow kept a bench under the arches at Carrow Junction, where he mended signal lamps and drank stewed tea from a tin mug. Above the bench he pinned a sketch in fountain pen of six beads in a row: Ile, Tyr, Gln, Asn, and two Cys in the middle, joined by their little sulphur bridge. Every waiting passenger got the lecture. He said the sketch was the only honest map on the line, because it showed what held things together when the frost got into everything, as it did the winter the bridge at Hollin Cutting came down.

One February a young woman came through with a suitcase and a heart drawn in biro on the back of a timetable. She asked whether a bond could break and mend itself. Aldous said it could, if you warmed it up and gave it a reason. He lent her a lamp, sent her down the last platform to wait for the rain to stop, and when she came back the heart had two small lines running through it, like a join.

The rain had stopped by then. Aldous wiped his hands and nodded at the empty track. That's the trick of it, he said. Break the bridge and the whole thing unravels into soup. Mend it and it holds its shape for life. The heart was never chemistry, mind. That's the bit you have to draw yourself. Mind the gap.