Black ink flash drawings on tracing paper: an anatomical heart with two roses and a sleeping rabbit inside, beside a dotwork cat head in a Dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with roses and cat head flash

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two tattoo design drawings sit on tracing paper. The upper left drawing shows an anatomical heart with two roses growing from its top and a sleeping rabbit curled inside its chamber. The lower right drawing is a cat head in three-quarter view, with large ears, detailed eyes and long whiskers. Both use fine black linework with stippled dotwork shading, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Dotwork Botanical Anatomical heart Rose Rabbit Cat Flower Sphynx cat

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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

Sit down and mind the kettle, the lot of you. The cat isn't mine, though she has slept on my coat every night since the trams stopped running, so you may as well let me call her mine for the telling. Her name was Doris, and she had no fur at all, only skin the colour of weak tea and ears like two open hands held up to catch the rain.

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Doris belonged to a clockmaker called Tobias Penhale, who worked above the chemist on Lantern Row. He kept a glass cabinet of hearts, pewter and wax and painted card, the sort the medical school sent him to mend. One February a porter from the dissecting rooms brought him a real heart wrapped in a butcher's cloth, still cold from the cellar, and asked him to make it keep time again. Tobias said a clock could not do that. The porter said he had seen a rabbit asleep inside it, curled up as tidy as a loaf, and that roses were growing out of the top like someone had planted them there on purpose.

Tobias laughed until he coughed, then he stopped laughing, because Doris had climbed onto the bench and was staring into the cloth with those enormous eyes. She did not blink once. He took the heart to the window, and in the grey light he saw the little animal stir and settle again, and two petals open on the top of the muscle as if they had been waiting all winter.

So when you walk past Lantern Row and see a single lamp burning at the top, don't knock. The cat will be on the sill, and the heart will be in its cabinet with the lid shut, and whatever is sleeping inside it will still be sleeping, because someone is minding the clock.