Traditional style flash drawing of a red anatomical heart with black rays, surrounded by an arrow, an owl's eye and a rose, with no body placement shown.

Anatomical heart with rays flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A red anatomical heart with arteries at the top is drawn in bold black outline, with small red and dark highlights on its lobes. Short black radiating lines surround the heart, and parts of an arrow, an owl's eye and a green and red rose appear at the edges of the sheet. The cream paper background and bold, even linework are typical of traditional flash art.

Traditional Heart Anatomical heart Ray Arrow Owl Eye Rose

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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

Fetch the lamp down off the hook, Maisie, and bring the good tin cup, for you'll not hear this one twice. My grandfather kept the light on Carrick Skerry for thirty-one winters, and the thing he prized above his pension was a red heart in a brass box that washed up in the cove the month the Mary Ellen went down. Nobody on the island would touch it. It was too warm, they said, and it beat under your palm like a wet bird.

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He carried it up the stairs every night and set it on the sill beside the lens, and the beam went round and round with the rays of that heart pulsing out over the black water, short sharp lines like a fisherman's hand flicking spray off the bow. Ships steered by it when the fog came down. The Dunmore boat came home twice on the strength of it, and an owl would sit on the gallery rail and watch the sea with one round eye, never blinking, as if it was keeping the count.

Then one February the lamp went dark on a Tuesday, and he never told anyone why he'd let the oil run low. Only that the heart had stopped being warm, and that he'd taken it down to the cove and given it back to the tide. Next morning a rose-coloured fishing float bobbed in the same spot, and on it, scratched in pencil, was a single word: Enough.

So mind the sill, girl. The light is still lit. It only needs someone patient enough to watch.