Black and grey realism tattoo of an anatomical heart with vessels and peony-like flowers on a forearm.

Anatomical heart and flowers on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an anatomical heart with its upper vessels and tangled tubes shown in detail covers the forearm. Clusters of layered, petal-shaped flowers spill down from beneath the heart and across the lower arm. The work uses smooth shading and fine contrast, with lighter greys on the flowers and darker outlines on the heart, against plain skin and a dark background.

Realism Botanical Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Flower Peony Vessel

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came off the Harwich ferry at six, damp at the corners and stamped with a forwarding label I had to squint at under the strip light. Inside, packed in newspaper gone soft as cloth, were forty bare-root peonies, their eyes tight and red as knuckles, and beneath them a book bound in brown calf with a phytosanitary form tucked into its cover. Plant material, the form said. Declared as roots, ornamental. Nothing about the book.

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I opened it on the steel table because the rules said I could, and found a heart on the first page, drawn from the front and then peeled open like an orange, every vessel labelled in copperplate. Someone had pressed flowers between the plates. The petals had gone the colour of weak tea and stuck to the margin beside the great vessels at the top. My supervisor, Gerald, leaned over my shoulder, said destroy the roots, keep the book if it was clean, and go for your tea. I said I would do the paperwork.

The paperwork took until eleven. Gerald went home. I wrapped the roots again, then the book, and sat in the booth with my sandwiches, turning the form over to read the sender's name in a tall, slanting hand. On the back of the envelope she had written Mam, as if the crate had been meant for someone who would know what to do with a heart that bloomed.

At closing I lifted one root out of the bin bag. It was the size of a child's fist and smelled of wet earth with something sweeter underneath. I slipped it into my coat pocket and wrote forty on the disposal sheet, which was true enough, and nobody counted.