Anatomical heart on a forearm
Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A small anatomical heart with visible vessels at the top is tattooed on the inner forearm, close to the elbow. The linework is fine and the shading is soft grey, giving the heart a realistic, slightly vintage look. The plain light grey background keeps the focus on the tattoo and the arm.
Find an artist for thisTake 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
The officer at Dover lifted the lid of the wooden box with two fingers, as though the thing inside might still be warm. Nested in tissue paper lay a wax heart the size of a plum, its great vessels rising from the top in a tangle of thin grey lines, each one painted by hand in a workshop above a chemist's in Ghent. I had carried it across the Channel on my lap for eleven hours.
Keep reading
He asked what it was for. I said it was for remembering, which is the sort of answer that earns a second look, so I told him about my great-aunt Mathilde, who taught drawing to nursing students and kept a dozen of these models on a shelf above her kettle. She had shaded every one with a sable brush and a grey she mixed herself, soft as pencil dust, so the vessels seemed to be still filling. The officer turned the heart towards the window and said nothing for a long while.
Then he stamped my form and slid it back across the counter. Tell your aunt the valves are very good, he said. I told him she had been dead since March. He nodded as if that was the answer he had expected, and held the door.
Outside, the car smelt of rain and diesel. I set the box on the passenger seat and buckled the belt across it, the way she once buckled me in, and drove north with it riding beside me like a passenger who had never once been sick on the journey.
More like this
From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.