Black and grey engraved-style anatomical heart tattoo with three I am. phrases and partial script text across the upper back.

Anatomical heart with I am. lettering on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an anatomical heart, shown with its vessels and chambers, sits centrally on the upper back. Fine stippling and hatched linework give the heart an engraved, textbook-illustration look, with the shading built up along the edges. Three small typewriter-style phrases reading I am. point to parts of the heart, and a cursive word is partly cut off at the right edge of the frame.

Back Heart Anatomical heart Lettering Phrase Script Vessel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate had to be finished by Friday, so Mr Pell kept the gas lamps lit past midnight and sent me to the back bench with a copper block and a box of gravers. The surgeon wanted the heart drawn from a cadaver at St Bart's, every valve and artery laid out like the roots of an old oak, and he wanted it cut so finely that a schoolboy could count the chambers without a glass.

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Pell's compositor had set three captions in the plain typewriter face used for ledgers, and he had sent the proofs back with a note: 'The gentleman says the lettering must read I am, and nothing else. He will not explain.' I cut the words into the margins myself, small enough to sit in the shadow of the aorta, and I did not ask who the gentleman was.

By the third night I understood that the surgeon's assistant, a thin man who coughed into his sleeve, had been sketching his own heart on the back of every spoiled proof, and each drawing was a little more worn than the last. Pell burned them in the grate without reading them. I kept one, rolled up inside my boot, and I have it still.

When the plate was finally printed I pulled the first impression and held it to the window. The lines were sharp, the veins clean, and the three small statements sat exactly where I had cut them, pointing at the chambers like a schoolmaster's pointer. Some mornings I read them aloud to the empty shop, and they sound less like a claim than a diagnosis, and I am no longer certain which one I was asked to write.