Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a forearm showing an anatomical heart with poppies growing from it and two curled animals resting inside.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with poppies on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart sits on the forearm, with three poppy flowers, buds and small leaves sprouting from the top of the heart. Two curled animals, which appear to be sleeping foxes, rest inside a chamber of the heart. The shading is built from stippled dots and fine linework in black and grey, and the design sits centrally on the arm against a grey paved background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Poppy Flower Leaves Fox Animal Bud

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 nearer, the lamp is smoking and I will not raise my voice over the goats. You want the one about the herbwife's heart, and you will hear it plainly, not dressed up the way the pedlars dress it in the market at Thessaly.

Keep reading

Her name was Telo, and her heart would not stay in her chest. Every night it slipped out, went down the hill past the olive terraces, and crawled into the broken lintel of an old temple that nobody had prayed to since the river changed its course. Two red foxes had dug their den there. They lay curled together like a pair of commas on a page, and they slept so deeply that the poppies on the ridge above them opened only after they had finished dreaming. Telo grew those poppies herself. She could tell from the colour of the petals which fox was dreaming of rain.

Then the king's physician came up the road with a bronze jar and a bad cough. He wanted the heart's sleep bottled for his fevers. Telo laughed and told him a heart with a den inside it cannot be poured into a jar. So the men went down the hill themselves in the dark. In the morning Telo found them sitting in a ring at the temple steps, quiet as stones, each with a poppy bud tucked behind his ear, and the jar lying empty in the dust.

So when your own chest knocks at night and you lie awake listening to it, do not get up and bolt the door against whatever is in there. Leave a dish of water by the step and let the poppies open in their own time. Go on, the lamp is nearly out. Count the knocks. Whatever is down there is only turning over in its sleep.