Black fine line tattoo of an anatomical heart pierced by an arrow on the inner upper arm, with a dotted outline and hatched shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart and arrow on an inner arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-needle style outline of an anatomical heart with an arrow passing through its lower right side, and a small dot at the arrow's tip. The heart has hatched shading on its lower edges and a dotted border around its outline, with a thin trailing line beneath it. The tattoo is in black ink only, shown in a close, well-lit photo of the inner arm against a plain grey background.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Heart Anatomical heart Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind that gull, he has his eye on the biscuit tin. You want the one about the surgeon's heart. Right. Forty-one days out from Bristol, in the year the sugar prices went mad, the Mary Coyle was becalmed off the Azores with nothing to eat but weevils and hope. Her ship's surgeon, a thin man called Ambrose Tull, had a habit of drawing. He sketched everything that came under his hands, every liver and lung, in a ledger with a pencil he kept behind one ear.

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One night a sailor named Dai Pritchard came down with a fever that turned the whites of his eyes yellow. Tull laid him out on the mess table by lantern light, and before the man was properly still Tull had drawn the heart in fine black ink, hatching the dark underside where the blood had settled. Then he did a queer thing. He took a bent arrow from the fletching box, the one the bosun used for marking rope, and laid it across the drawing so the point ran out past the edge of the page. He put a dot where it stopped, as if it had landed somewhere and was still landing.

Ask me where it landed. Go on. Nobody aboard knew, and Tull never said, but the wind came up the next morning, fair and steady, and we raised the Cornish coast in nine days. Years later I asked him what the dot meant. He tapped the ledger with his pipe stem and said, "Where the aim is, boy. Not where the wound is." Then he went back to smoking, and the gull got the biscuits after all.