Black and grey anatomical heart tattoo on the forearm, set over a pale blue dotted background with printed book text.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A detailed engraved-style human heart sits at the centre of the forearm, with its vessels and surface shaded in black and grey. Behind it, faded printed text reads FIGURAE EXPLANATIO and includes words such as Aorta and pulmonary veins, layered over a light blue halftone dot pattern. The composition is vertical along the arm, with the heart as the focal point and the text fragments framing it.

Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Anatomy Vein

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The travelling show came into Harrowby the week its big top lost the third pole, and Mr Oakes sold the lion to a farmer for the price of a good cart horse. What he kept was a box of old books bound in green cloth, belonging to a surgeon his wife had once nursed. Among them was a folio stamped FIGURAE EXPLANATIO, and inside it a plate of a heart with every vessel named in copperplate.

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Nell, who walked the wire with a stick because her knees had gone, asked her father what a heart was for if it could be drawn so plainly. He said it was for pumping, and the aorta sent the blood out like carts leaving a town for market. She did not believe him. Each evening she copied a plate onto the back of the bearded lady's handbill, and each morning a rival show pasted its own paper over her work.

By autumn the ring was empty except for the two of them and a mule called Parliament. Nell carried the folio to the village schoolmaster, who turned the pages slowly and read out the names of the veins, pulmonary and cava, until the lamp burned low. He said the heart in the plate had come from a man who walked every road to every fair in the county, and that the drawer who made it had been paid in eggs.

When the show finally folded, Nell wrapped the folio in oilcloth and carried it on her forearm to the coast, where the tide came in blue over the stones. A ferryman asked what was printed there. She told him it was a heart with its roads named, and he laughed and said he had never known a heart to need a map.