Black and grey engraving-style anatomical heart tattoo with numbered labels and fig. 4 caption on the inner forearm, shown in three black and white photographs.

Anatomical heart tattoo on the inner forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-panel black and white collage shows an anatomical heart with numbered labels and the caption fig. 4, drawn in the manner of a vintage engraving. The linework is fine and dense, with hatching and stippled shading that gives the chambers and vessels depth. The tattoo sits on the inner forearm and is shown in a wide view, a close view and a detail view, with the design in black ink only.

Dotwork Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Engraving Vessel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The engraver's daughter had kept the plates for her father after the fever took him, and when the Ashworth company wanted a new board for the station clock, she carried the copper down to the works herself. The foreman, a man called Pell with ink in the creases of his knuckles, turned the plate over and found fig. 4 scratched into the back in her father's neat hand. Under it, a list of numbers, one for each vessel that led out of the heart and into the body that carried it.

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She told him the numbers were the trains. Every line that ran out of the station had a vessel, she said, and every vessel had to be cut clean or the whole town would go still. Pell laughed, then stopped laughing when the signalman came in with a hand pressed to his chest and said the eleven fifteen had left without its guard. The guard was in the waiting room, sitting on a bench, looking at his own wrist as if it were a timetable he could not read.

The daughter took the burin from its box and began again at number one. She worked through the night, the lamp hissing, cutting hatching into the chambers so the blood would have somewhere to pool, stippling the walls so they would hold their shape. At the bottom of the plate, where the ventricle narrowed to a point, she cut the smallest vessel of all and did not number it.

In the morning the eleven fifteen came in on time, its brass steaming, and the guard stood up from the bench and went to his post. Nobody asked her what the unnumbered line was for. She left the plate on the bench for the next engraver, face up, so the heart could see the platform.