Black and grey botanical tattoo of an anatomical heart with daisy-like flowers and buds growing from it, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with flowers on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows an anatomical heart with its vessels visible at the base, with several flower heads and stems rising from the top. The linework is bold and the heart is shaded with fine stippling and grey tones to give it depth. The photograph is taken in black and white, with the arm filling most of the frame and a shirt sleeve visible at the top left.

Botanical Upper arm Heart Anatomical heart Flower Daisy Bud Stem Vessel

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

Master Holloway kept the anatomy plates in the solar at Harrowgate, where the roof had fallen in the winter before and the rain came sideways across his desk. I was sixteen, paid in bread and ink, and my work was copying the hearts. He would not allow hatching. "Hatching makes the vessels look like string, Nell," he said, tapping the page with his pipe stem. "Dots. The body is made of dots, if you look close enough."

Keep reading

Beyond the solar wall lay the inner ward, and in the ward lay the old chapel, and in the chapel's floor, where the flags had split, the daisies grew. The cook picked them for the pot and swore they were the only thing in the castle that didn't want feeding. Nobody had planted them. They simply came up each spring through the cracks, white and gold, as if the stones were keeping something warm underneath.

Holloway died in March with his boots on. Under his last plate I found a sheet he had never shown anyone. It was a heart, fat and careful, its great vessels bent up at the base like the roots of a plant, and from its crown the flower heads rose on bare stems, each petal shaded in dots. I thought it a joke at first, the sort of thing he drew to make the apprentice blush.

Then I went down to the chapel and found the daisies had pushed up in a line from the altar to the wall, straight as a ruled margin. I sat on the cold flags with his pen and finished the drawing, dot by dot, until the page had gone grey with them and the flowers on paper seemed to lean towards the window like they had always been growing there.