Dotwork anatomical heart tattoo showing two mice on a brick wall under a crescent moon and stars, in black and grey, with partial tattoos at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with two mice

Dotwork · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey anatomical heart with stippled dotwork shading and bold outlines, with two mice sitting on a brick wall inside the lower chamber. A crescent moon and small dots for stars sit above them against a dotted background. Partial tattoos at the left edge, including a yellow and black insect and a red heart, add colour to the frame, and the skin shows freckles and fine texture.

Dotwork Traditional Other Heart Anatomical heart Moon Star Bee Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hannah found the mice on the brick wall above the winding house just before the bell for the back shift. They sat side by side with their tails curled round their feet, and when she came close they did not run for the stable hole the way every mouse in Gresley Row ran. Her uncle kept the lamp room and always said the pit mice knew more about the seam than any surveyor from Newcastle, so she ran to tell him.

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She found Uncle Joe at the cage with his cap in his hands and the men already stamping their boots on the platform. 'They won't come off the wall,' she said. He looked at the mice for a long time, then at the lamp in his other hand. The flame leaned sideways towards the shaft as if it were breathing in. Nobody in the village liked to say it aloud, but the air had been wrong for three days.

He sent the cage down empty, then called the men back up one by one, ticking each name against the chalk board by the door. Hannah stayed by the wall. The moon came up over the spoil heap, a thin white crescent, and she counted the pale dots of stars the way her mother had taught her to count stitches. The mice watched the cage rise and fall, and never once looked down.

When the last man stepped off, the wall was empty. Hannah found two small wet prints on the bricks. In the morning Joe chalked two extra marks beside the names on the board, and nobody rubbed them out.