Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart overgrown with flowers and leaves, across an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with flowers on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large anatomical heart fills the upper arm, with its chambers and vessels rendered in solid black and fine stippled dotwork. Its surface is patterned with swirling wood-grain lines, clustered blooms and flowers, and sprigs of fern and leaves that spill from the top and base. Bold black outlines define the heart against the pale skin, and the composition is balanced around the curve of the arm.

Blackwork Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Heart Anatomical heart Flower Leaves Foliage Fern 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

Sit down, love, before the kettle goes cold, because this one takes the length of a cup. Ward Seven had a night porter called Dessie Crane who swore the old boiler room held a heart, the kind you could hear knocking through the pipes at three in the morning. Nobody believed him until the winter the radiators failed and he went down with a torch to find the fault.

Keep reading

There was no fault in the boiler. There was a heart drawn in chalk on the whitewashed wall, chambers and vessels laid out like a diagram, with ferns pushing up from its top and rings of wood grain running across its middle like the inside of an oak felled a century since. Somebody had crowded its base with chrysanthemums and little five-petalled flowers. Dessie laid his palm against the plaster and felt a faint tick beneath it, slow and even, the way a thing keeps time when it means to stay.

The drawing belonged to a retired beekeeper called Alma Tully, who had been waiting since August for a valve operation and had filled the margins of her charts with pencilled gardens. Within a week she was moved to a side room, and the porters found her chalk sprays of blossom climbing the stairwell walls as well. When the boiler room was finally repainted, the surgeons say, the valve held for another thirty years, which is more than the paperwork ever predicted.

Dessie never mentioned the heart again, but every night shift he propped the boiler room door open a crack so the warmth could find its way up through the building. In the mornings the sill outside Ward Seven was damp with a green sprig of fern, as if something had been growing in the dark and wanted to be let out.