Black and white engraved drawing of an anatomical heart with dense hatched linework, presented as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart engraving line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a human heart with its major vessels drawn in the style of a vintage woodcut or engraving. Fine parallel hatching and cross-hatching model the surfaces, with bold outlines around the chambers and vessels. The design is rendered in black ink on a plain white background, with the heart centred and filling most of the frame.

Heart Anatomical heart Anatomy

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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 lamp in the dissecting room at St Bride's had been left burning, and Mr Ambrose Tennant found the night porter asleep on the stool beside the slab with a pie wrapped in newspaper on his knee. Tennant did not wake him. He had come for the heart the surgeons had set aside that afternoon, a clean one from a carter who had fallen from his cart in Smithfield, and he meant to draw it before the ink dried in his mind and he forgot the order of the vessels.

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He worked by the lamp with a steel pen and a pot of Indian ink, the way his master had taught him, starting at the great vessel rising from the top like the trunk of a tree that has been split and bent back on itself. The aorta he drew first, then the pulmonary branches, each one ringed with fine parallel strokes so the wall of it seemed to swell under the paper. The shadows on the right ventricle took him an hour. He cross-hatched until his wrist ached and the ventricle sat heavy and dark on the page, the way the thing had sat in the carter's chest.

When he finally lifted his pen, the porter was awake and standing at his elbow, looking not at the drawing but at the real organ on the slab beside it. Tennant waited for a rebuke. Instead the old man said quietly, "He had a daughter in Bermondsey who took in sewing. Put her name at the bottom, sir, so the book knows whose heart it was." Tennant wrote the name, Nell Garrow, beneath the lines, and the lamp guttered out.