Black and grey tattoo of an anatomical heart with sweet pea flowers and vines on the side of the ribs, shown in fine hatched linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with sweet pea vines on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed anatomical heart with visible vessels and chambers sits on the side of the ribs, with sweet pea flowers, buds and leaves climbing out of the top of it. The work uses dense hatching and stippled shading to give the heart volume, while the flowers and leaves are outlined with fine, varied linework. The image is in black and grey against pale skin, with a plain, slightly blurred background and a hand pressing the skin at the left edge.

Botanical Realism Ribs Heart Anatomical heart Flower Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Peel that one thinner, boy, you're feeding the gulls and not my galley. Sit where the stove can warm your knees and I'll tell you about Mr Harrow's heart. He was surgeon on the Calliope Vane, a long grey man who kept his lancets in a green baize roll and a tin box of sweet peas on the windowsill, because he said a man who cut people open ought to have something soft to look at.

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Every voyage he drew the hearts of whoever died aboard, slowly, with a steel nib and ink he watered down with rum. He'd lay the sheet on this very table and say, there, that's where the trouble lived. Hatch it close, he'd tell me, so the light has somewhere to sit. I was fourteen and thought him soft in the head.

The winter we rounded the Horn, his own chest started to labour. He drew his heart himself, shaky as a child's, then pressed the paper into my palm and told me not to frame it. The sweet peas had come up through a crack in the galley boards where he'd spilled his tea, and by March they were climbing the stovepipe, purple and stubborn, sending out tendrils like questions. He said flowers grow out of whatever's been broken open, if you let them.

We buried him off the Chilean coast with his lancets. When we came into Valparaiso I planted the last of the vines in a pail on the quay, and they're still climbing the rail of the house I bought there, with his drawing framed by the door. Now peel, Tobias. The sweet peas don't care how thin you go, but I do.