Black and grey tattoo of an anatomical heart with arteries and labelled numbers, in an engraved style, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed anatomical heart with its major vessels and branching arteries is tattooed on the forearm. The design uses fine black linework and dense hatching to build shading, giving it the look of a vintage engraving, with small numbered labels along the edges. The image is in black and grey and is framed close, with the arm running diagonally and a grey shirt visible at the right edge.

Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Vein

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

Ada had been counting the windfalls since breakfast, because her father said a plate was only as good as its key, and every number on the copper had to match a word in the margin. Wasps worked the cider barrels at the bottom of Hollins orchard. The Bramley limbs bent low under the weight of August, and the grass between the trunks was sticky with fallen fruit.

Keep reading

Her father had cut the heart himself, three winters back, for the dissection book the surgeon in Leeds had commissioned. He never liked the arteries. 'They branch like something that wants to get out,' he said, and then went back to his burin. She thought of that now, looking up through the leaves at the crooked limbs of the oldest tree, the one with the split trunk bound in wire, and the way its boughs forked and forked until the twigs were finer than hair.

On the last Saturday of the month she took the ladder, a basket and the brass dividers, and she numbered the branches as she went. One, the trunk. Two, the fork where the old graft had taken. Fourteen, a limb so thin it held only three apples, each one dark red on the side that faced the sun. She wrote the numbers in chalk on the bark, then paused. The tree had no margin to explain itself. It simply kept growing toward the light, fed from the same root.

When the basket was full she carried it down the slope to the house, where her father sat with the plate under a lamp. She set one apple beside it on the table. He looked at it, then at the copper, then at her, and for once he did not reach for the key. 'Label that one,' he said quietly, 'and leave the rest to the tree.'