Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart displayed under a glass dome on a stand, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart under a glass dome

Dotwork · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed anatomical heart sits on a thin stand inside a tall glass dome that rests on a banded base. The heart and base are built from solid black linework with fine dotwork stippling for shading and texture. The dome is outlined in bold black line and filled with light dots, and the tattoo is centred on plain skin with no other elements.

Dotwork Heart Anatomical heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Hollin Street Museum of Anatomy wanted the night shift, which is how I ended up with the glass cabinet on the third floor. The heart lived under a bell jar on a brass stand, its base wrapped in a band of greased linen fastened with a small tin buckle. Mr Tully, who had catalogued it in 1891, had written only that it came from a surgeon's widow in Scarborough and must never be opened to the air.

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I dusted it every Thursday with a goose feather and a cloth no thicker than a fingernail. The grit from the street settled on the dome in a fine stipple, and I learned to breathe out slowly so it would not lift again while I worked around the stand. It took an hour, and in that hour I was not allowed to touch anything else, which suited me well enough.

The Thursday my father's letter arrived, I sat on the back step with it unopened and watched the light move across the glass. He wrote that the house was sold and the piano had gone to a man in Otley. Tucked inside the envelope was a horn button from his good coat, the one he had kept since my mother's funeral. I carried it upstairs and laid it on the linen beside the buckle, the way Mr Tully had once pressed a rose into the catalogue drawer.

When I came back the next Thursday, the button had gone. In its place sat one pale speck of dust, exactly on the brass stand, as if someone had breathed on the glass and taken what they needed. I left it there. Some things, I decided, are better kept under glass.