Black ink drawing of an anatomical heart with a gramophone horn rising from its top and a hand crank on its right side, shaded with fine hatching on a white background.

Anatomical heart fused with a gramophone horn

Black and grey · Flash

A realistic anatomical heart is combined with a vintage gramophone, with the horn flaring out from the upper left and a bent tube and crank attached to the right side. The drawing is built from pen and ink hatching and cross-hatching to model the heart muscle, vessels and the metal horn. It is rendered entirely in black ink on a plain white background, with the subject centred and fully visible.

Heart Horn Anatomy Vessel Music

Find an artist for this

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

Don't you go thinking the gramophone was the clever part, because it wasn't. Old Amos Penhale kept a wind-up machine in the wheelhouse of the Good Intent, a brass horn flared like a foxglove, and every night off Whitby he cranked it till the spring sang out over the water. The lads swore the herring came up to listen. Amos said fish like a steady beat, same as a man does, and that the sea was only a long slow pulse with the drink on top.

Keep reading

Then came the February gale that took the Intent and four men with her. Three were found in the Dogger and one never was. For a month the gramophone sat silent on the windowsill of the cottage on Church Street, and nobody dared touch the crank. His wife Ada walked down to the harbour wall every tide with her shawl pulled tight, and the gulls shrieked at her like they had gossip to share.

Ada carried the machine down to the wall one grey morning in March, the old record of Amos whistling Abide With Me worn thin with use. She wound it with her good hand. Men came out of the Ship and stood with their caps in their fists, and she set the horn towards the fleet coming in round the piers. Nobody said a word about the cold.

Forty minutes later the first smack rounded the lighthouse, then another, and that tune rode the wind out to meet them. You'll hear folk say a hymn can't steer a boat. Ada knew better. She kept the crank turning until the spring gave out, and then she sat on the wall with the horn in her lap and listened for the sea to answer, which it did, with a bell buoy clanging off the Scar as if it had kept time all along.