Traditional style tattoo of an anatomical heart formed from red anemone, white rose and orange dahlia flowers, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Anatomical heart made of flowers on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey and black engraved anatomical heart with its vessels at the top forms the centre of the design, with flowers filling its outline. A red anemone, a white rose, an orange dahlia and a pink chrysanthemum make up the lower and side sections, with bold black outlines and soft shading. The red and pink flowers contrast with the pale heart and the dark surrounding skin, and the photo is taken straight on across the upper back.

Traditional Botanical Back Anatomical heart Heart Anemone Rose Dahlia Chrysanthemum Flower

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

Maud had been gutting herring since five, and the boxes at the back of the Skellow Quay fish shed were already stacked higher than the tide line. Her brother Eli's boat, the Marigold, should have tied up by four. Instead there was only the grey smear of the estuary and a gull working the slipway with its head cocked, as if it had heard something under the water.

Keep reading

In the drawer beneath the scales she kept the engraved plate she had torn from a library book in April, a heart drawn in fine hatching, its great vessels branching at the top like the roots of a stripped tree. Her mother had called it a pump and a bag of blood. Maud had said that was the least romantic thing anyone had ever said about a pump. Nobody on the quay grew anything this late in the year, but Mrs Quayle at the chandlery still had a window box of chrysanthemums going brown at the edges, and the churchyard wall by the lifeboat house held one white rose that refused to quit.

She cut what she could find with the herring knife, wiped it on her apron, and laid the blooms over the plate one at a time. A red anemone went where the left chamber should be. The rose sat over the thickest part of the heart, and a chrysanthemum packed the base like a fist. By the time she had finished, the old engraving was hardly visible, and what remained looked less like an organ than a garden that had decided to keep beating.

At twenty to six the Marigold's horn sounded off the breakwater. Maud pinned the drawing to the shed door with two nails and went out to meet the boat, leaving the petals to curl in the wet air where Eli would see them first.