Black and grey tattoo of an anatomical heart beneath a radiating all-seeing eye, with botanical sprigs, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with eye and botanical sprigs on a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an anatomical heart with visible vessels and textured shading sits centre frame, with a single eye inside a burst of radiating lines above it. Fine branches with small leaves frame the heart on both sides, and small labels such as 'Fig 1', 'G' and 'E' are drawn into the design like an engraved anatomical plate. The linework is dense and the background is plain pale skin, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Back Heart Eye Branches Leaves Ray Anatomy Vessel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Joan,

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The plate came back from the printers on Tuesday with the eye still in it. I told Mr Pardoe it was a smudge from my burnisher, and he laughed and said the Royal College would never notice one. They did not. The book goes out in March with Fig 1 printed over a heart I drew from the specimen at Ashworth Cottage Hospital, the morning after your father's funeral, when nobody else wanted to stand in that cold room.

I cut every vessel by hand. You will remember the fine branches I made you practise on copper offcuts, how each one must taper or the ink pools in the corners. I gave the heart its own small wood, six leaves to a sprig, and I set the letters where a surgeon would look for them: G for the great vessel, E for the lower chamber. Mr Pardoe asked what E stood for. I said Edith, which is true, though she would hate to see it printed.

The eye I cannot account for. It was not on my drawing. It sat above the heart when I finished the rays, and though I went at it twice with the scraper, the lines kept closing back around it, as if the copper preferred it there. Every morning the rays look like they point at something I have not yet understood.

Come up at Easter if the trains run. Bring the burnisher, and bring your own opinion about the eye.

Yours, Harold