Black and grey realism tattoo of an anatomical heart with lines of text across it, on a thigh, shown beside a paper printout of the same heart outline.

Anatomical heart with text on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a thigh bearing a detailed anatomical heart tattoo, with the vessels and chambers shaded in fine lines and stipple. Lines of printed text run through the heart's form, and the heart outline is echoed by a paper printout held up beside the leg. The composition is close and slightly angled, with the subject filling most of the frame.

Realism Thigh Heart Anatomical heart Text

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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

The printer in the back of the Tollbridge library had jammed for three weeks, so Mrs Okonedo fed the pages through by hand, one at a time, the way her late husband had taught her to feed a chicken its grain. Each sheet came out with the same few lines of verse ghosting through the heart's outline, as if the words had been poured into the valves and left to settle. Nobody in the reading group could say who had written them. The book was a county anthology, the spine split, the owner's name scrubbed off with a thumb.

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She kept the drawing on the kitchen table under a sugar bowl. Her grandson, who had a needle and a steady hand and a girlfriend he kept mentioning, asked whether he could copy it onto his own leg. She told him the heart was not a design, it was a map of a place that did not exist, and he laughed and said that was exactly what made it good ink. In the morning she found the paper moved. The sugar bowl had been set down a little to the left, and the lines of text had been traced over in pencil, the letters darker now where the valves met.

She read them aloud to the empty room, slowly, the way you read a recipe you already know by heart. At the last line the kettle clicked off in the next room and she did not go to it. The lines said nothing about hearts at all. They were a list of the gates of a village, and the last gate was the one she had walked through the day she married, and the pencil had pressed hard there, nearly through the paper.