Fine line black tattoo of an anatomical heart with sprigs of small flowers growing from its vessels, placed on the side of the ribs.

Anatomical heart with flowers on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single anatomical heart is drawn in delicate black linework, with its major vessels rising into clusters of small five-petalled flowers and buds. The shading is built from fine hatching and stippling on the chamber walls, with the outline kept light and even. The design is shown in black ink on pale skin, centred on the side of the ribcage with the fabric of a dark top draped across the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Heart Anatomical heart Flower Vessel Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The proofs came back from the engraver in Sheffield with the ink still soft at the edges, and Edith Marrow laid them out on the kitchen table beside the teapot to count. Eleven plates. Each showed the same heart, the one Dr Gedge had opened in March, its chambers hatched as fine as cloth. It was the vessels she had fought over. Gedge wanted them plain, tubes that ended at the cut. Edith had drawn them rising from the aorta into sprigs of campion and thyme, small five-petalled things no anatomy book would print.

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"Take them out," Gedge had said, tapping a plate with his pencil stub. "Nobody buys a heart with a hedge growing from it." She had said nothing. The publisher's letter insisted the cuts were final by Friday. Yet on the eleventh plate she found a bud she did not remember drawing, pale and tight at the crown of the left ventricle, its stem running down into the muscle like a root seeking water.

She sat with that plate until the lamp guttered. The house was quiet except for the clock and the rain on the area steps. She thought of the cadaver's cold hands, of how Gedge had sniffed at the lilac on her collar and called it a distraction.

In the morning the bud had opened, five petals, white as a blade. Edith left it alone. She wrapped the proofs in brown paper, wrote the address in her smallest hand, and on the back of the parcel added one line: print as drawn.