Two views of a forearm tattoo of an anatomical heart with a teal and green bird, red ginkgo leaves and an orange sun with dotted rays, in mixed colour and dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with bird and ginkgo leaves on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an anatomical heart in grey linework and stippled shading, with a teal and green bird with a long beak perched across its front. Red ginkgo leaves sprout from the top of the heart, and an orange sun sits below the bird with fine dotted rays. The image shows the same design twice on one forearm, with the colour ink standing out against the greyscale shading.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Bird Hummingbird Leaves Sun Dot Ray

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

The hummingbird came to the apothecary's yard in the second week of the autumn rains, when the ginkgo trees along the canal had already begun to drop their fans of yellow onto the cobbles. Marta found it sitting on the lip of the drying trough, its green throat rising and falling too quickly to count. She had been told by her uncle that such birds carried messages between the living and the stopped, and she had not believed him, but she set a dish of sugared water beside it all the same.

Keep reading

The bird drank, then flew to the ginkgo by the gate and stayed there, turning its long beak toward the heart-shaped leaves as though reading them. Marta understood then that the old man's dying had been the thing it was waiting for. She had been keeping his anatomy books on the shelf above the counter, the ones with the copper plates of the human chest, and she took the largest down and opened it on the bench. The heart on the page had its vessels laid open like roots. Beside it she drew a small sun in red ink, and then the rays, one dot at a time.

When she looked up the bird had gone, but a single leaf, fine as a coin, lay on the page over the heart. She pressed it flat and left it there. Her uncle's chair stood empty by the window, and somewhere down the canal a bell rang the hour, and Marta, for the first time since the funeral, went out into the yard and did not feel the cold.