Traditional colour tattoo of an anatomical heart with blue and red vessels and banners reading 'You are the blood in my veins' on an upper arm.

Anatomical heart with banner scroll

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of an anatomical heart, shaded in red with white and blue vessels, sits between two scrolled banners. The banners carry the words 'You are the blood in my veins' in black lettering on a tan background. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated fills are typical of a traditional design, with the lightning-like blue veins at the base adding contrast.

Traditional Upper arm Heart Anatomical heart Banner Ribbon Lettering Vein

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cool box rode on the passenger seat like a passenger who disliked the bends. Ruth Paulson had four units of O negative strapped beneath its lid, and the A road over the moor was slick with rain, lit only by her headlamps and the reflector posts ticking past like a clock.

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Calder Royal needed them for a theatre list starting at seven. She did not think about the people at the far end of the labels. The labels held numbers, not names, and that suited her. Her husband Len had built fishing cobles in Whitby for thirty years and used to say blood was just the sea we carry about with us, slopping round in the dark, going wherever it's sent. He would have wanted a better word than sent, she thought, and then a lorry's full beam filled the cab and she had to stop thinking altogether.

At the loading bay a porter called Kwame took the box from her with both hands, as if it held eggs. A nurse came out in a green gown and paper cap and held out a clipboard. Her handwriting was the neat, rounded sort you learn at school and never lose. 'He's been waiting on this one all night,' she said, and Ruth understood she meant the patient, not the box, and was surprised by how much that mattered.

The drive home was quieter. The rain thinned to nothing somewhere past the reservoir, and she drove with the heater off and the empty box knocking against the seat beside her, light as a coat on a hook. Len's old flask rolled against her ankle at the corners. She left it where it was.