Two black ink heart designs on white paper: an anatomical heart with peony flowers in dotwork, and a geometric heart in fine line hatching.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical and geometric heart designs on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two heart designs are drawn in black ink on white paper. The left heart is anatomical, with vessels at the top and two peony flowers with leaves, rendered in dense stippled dotwork shading. The right heart is built from angular facets filled with parallel hatched lines, with no colour or body placement shown.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mr Ashdown, the second drawing came back from the mainland with a tear along the top vessel where the ink had bled through the paper. I have pinned it above the stove so you can see what the damp did. Your sister says I should stop fussing, but the lamp room is cold and the drawing is the only warm thing I have left to look at.

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The left-hand heart is yours, the one with the peonies. Father said you could make a flower look like it had been breathing, and you did. Every petal is built from dots, thousands of them, so that the light from the lens catches the rose-coloured shadows as if they were wet. I counted the dots on the lower bloom one night with a pin, and gave up at four hundred.

The right-hand heart is mine. I made it with ruler and nib, every facet hatched in the same direction so that it looks like a stack of slates after rain. Mrs Quayle called it cold. Perhaps it is. But it is the only heart I have ever drawn that does not need a flower to explain itself, and when the fog came in last Tuesday and the foghorn sounded every ninety seconds, I found I could trace its lines with my eyes shut.

Send me the stippled one when it is dry. I will keep the ruled one in the gallery window, where the boats can see it on their way in.

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