Black and grey blackwork tattoo of an anatomical heart pierced by a dagger, with roots and a geometric frame, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart and dagger on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A dagger pierces an anatomical heart shown in dense linework, with the lower half of the heart filled with faceted geometric shapes. Thin roots trail down from a large triangle and diamond frame beneath the heart. The design is entirely black ink in dotwork and fine line shading on the outer arm, set against a plain light wall.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Heart Anatomical heart Dagger Root Triangle Diamond Geometric frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hill above Carrow took a man every few winters, and the people there had long agreed it was owed something, though nobody agreed what. In the wet spring, when the roof came down on the Long Level, Ada Rennick's husband Jem was among those under it. The men dug for two days and found only his cap and a broken lamp. Ada went up the lane to old Nan Tolley, who kept bees and knew things, and Nan said the hill kept what it was given, and that a thing given honestly came back as light in the rock.

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So Ada took the knife Jem used for trimming lamp wicks, the one with the horn handle worn pale where his thumb went, and walked up to the adit in the dark. She did not throw it in. She knelt in the mud at the mouth and pressed it down into the spoil and said his name three times, slowly, the way you would call a dog home. The ground drank the knife the way a sponge drinks water.

By morning black roots had come up through the heap like hair through a grave, and where they touched the cut faces of the rock, the stone had gone bright in sharp planes, as clean as the edges of a cut diamond. The men who went in again on the third day said the passage had reshaped itself around a pocket of air, and in it sat Jem, back against the wall, his own lamp burning steady beside him. The knife lay across his knees.

He said afterwards that he had heard her the whole time. Ada never went down the hill again. She kept a jar of the bright rock on the windowsill, and when the children asked why it was warm to the touch, she said it was only the hill keeping its side of the bargain.