Black dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart above a face with a third eye and a tear, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart above a face on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stippled black dotwork tattoo shows an anatomical heart with its vessels resting on top of a face with closed eyes, a third eye in the forehead and a single tear. The shading is built entirely from dots, giving soft tonal changes across the heart and face. The design is in black and grey on a pale forearm, centred against a light, plain background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Face Eye Tear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit in close, the lot of you, for the 9.14 is never punctual and I have till it comes. There was a signalwoman at Harrowmere called Edith Quill who kept her heart where her hat ought to sit. The company had told her a heart tucked under the ribs was no use to a woman who must read a board at fifty yards in fog, so she took the old clockmaker's advice and had it moved up, set on her crown like a lamp, and it burned red through the rain for anyone coming up the line.

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Every train that came through safe, the heart beat slow and steady. But Edith had also grown a third eye in her brow from years of staring down those rails, and it wept one bright tear for each train that never came home. The tear would run past her nose and drop onto the levers, and the porters would wipe it away with their sleeves without a word, for that was how the line remembered its dead.

One winter night the eye would not shut. The tear ran and ran, and the 11.40 came round the bend with its lamps dim and its driver nodding at the regulator. Edith stood in the box with her heart blazing above her, pulled every lever she owned, and the red glow swung across the sleepers like a warning bell.

The train stopped a yard short of the buffers. Nobody aboard knew how close it had come. In the morning Edith set her heart back where it belonged, dried the eye with her shawl, and went back to reading the board. The tear was never seen again, though the porters still lift their caps to that box whenever the 9.14 runs on time.