Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart with a rose stem, smoke-like wisps and the words Comfortably Numb, on the outer thigh.

Anatomical heart with rose stem on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic anatomical heart sits on the thigh, with a rose stem growing from its top, thorned and bearing a bud, leaves and a looping ribbon-like shape. Wisps of smoke rise from the stem, and the handwritten script Comfortably Numb curves beneath the heart. The shading is built from stippled dots and fine vessel lines in black and grey, with a soft, even tone across the skin.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Heart Anatomical heart Rose Stem Leaves Smoke Ribbon Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The heart on the shelf in Dr Ashworth's surgery had been painted by someone who had never been allowed to touch a real one, all blue veins and waxy pride, and I dusted it every Thursday while the waiting room filled with coughs. Mother said a girl with a duster in her hand had no business thinking about hearts. I thought about them constantly.

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Frank Doyle came in that spring with a bruise on his knuckles and a rose cutting wrapped in wet newspaper, which he said he had taken from the vicarage wall. He smoked Woodbines on the back step while I rolled bandages, and the smoke curled up past the drainpipe. He wanted to leave for Sheffield. He said the town was a stopped clock. I told him stopped clocks were right twice a day, which made him laugh, and then made him stop laughing.

The rose finally bloomed on the sill of the back room the week Frank had promised to send for me. He had tied a length of blue ribbon round the stem, and it trailed down over the bricks like a question. Dr Ashworth came out to the step with his hat in his hand and said the boy had been taken to the infirmary in the night, a fall from the scaffold at the mill, and that nobody had thought to fetch me. Inside, the heart on the shelf kept its quiet, even beat of paint.

I did not go to Sheffield. I went to the infirmary every Sunday with the rose cut short in a jam jar, and I sat by a bed where a boy who had promised to take me dozed under a sheet, and I told him the news of the town in the order the town had given it to me. The nurse caught me reading his chart one Sunday and said he was comfortably numb on the morphia. That is all it was, I told her. That is all it was, and I went home and dusted the heart.