Black and white photo of a small fine line and dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart inside a dotted circle, on the upper arm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart in a dotted circle on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline drawing of an anatomical heart with its vessels sits inside a loose ring of dots. The linework is fine and the dots are evenly spaced, with no shading. The tattoo is centred on the skin against a plain, softly lit background, with a brick wall and fabric at the edges of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Heart Anatomical heart Dotted circle Outline

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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

Sit yourself down by the fire, and mind the cat, she's been waiting on that stool since the tide turned. There was a doctor came over on the Tuesday boat, the year the big storm took the pier, and he had a bag full of books with hearts in them, every chamber and valve drawn out like the inside of a lobster pot. Nobody on Inish Carrig had ever seen their own heart, mind. We only felt it knocking when we climbed the cliff path too quick.

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He drew one for old Nell Corrigan on the back of a tide table, and she laughed at it. "That's a pump with the pipes sticking out," she said, and he said that was about the size of it. She took the pencil off him and set a ring of dots round the drawing, the way she pricked the markers into her nets so she'd know the mesh was true. "There," says she, "now it's holding its own breath and it can't wander off."

Nell kept that tide table in the biscuit tin with her thimble and her good scissors. When her son went out past the reef in February, the boat came home without him, but the table came back in the lifeboatman's pocket, folded to the heart. People said it was morbid. I thought it the most sensible thing anyone on this island ever did with a drawing.

So when you go up the cliff path tomorrow and your chest starts its racket, don't you be frightened. Count the dots. There's forty-one of them, and every one is in its place, and that's all the holding anybody gets.