A collage of nine dotwork tattoos of anatomical hearts, each holding a small scene such as a ship, a skeleton under a moon, or a forest, shown in black and grey on arms and legs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical hearts with scenes inside

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows nine anatomical heart designs, most photographed on skin, with a tiny scene inside each heart such as a teapot and cupboard, two cats, a planet, a ship at sea, a skeleton beneath a crescent moon, and a forest under stars. The linework is fine and the shading is built from stippled dots, giving a textured, engraved look. Everything is in black and grey ink, and the centre panel is a line drawing on white paper with the words YOU LIVE THERE beneath it.

Dotwork Other Anatomical heart Heart Teapot Cat Planet Ship Skeleton Moon Forest Star Couple Collage

Find an artist for this

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 man with the cardboard box reached the hut ten minutes before the last bus, which told me he expected trouble. He set the box on my counter and lifted out a glass sphere the size of a grapefruit, its edges wrapped in a metal heart that had grown veins like ivy. Through the glass I could see a kitchen no bigger than a thumbnail, a kettle on a little stove, a dresser with plates, and a pair of cats asleep on a sill. "Anatomical," he said, as if that explained the paperwork. I asked him what the form wanted, and he said, "Country of residence."

Keep reading

I took the magnifier from its hook and bent over the glass. Past the kitchen was a room with a ship riding grey waves, then a planet with its rings tilted like a sleepy eye, then a skeleton sitting beneath a crescent moon with a pipe in its hand. The last room was a forest pressed under a sky of stars. Each one was a place where someone could have made a life, and each one had been drawn with a patience I found myself respecting, dot by dot, the way my father once taught me to count stitches.

When I looked up, he was pointing. In the smallest room, lit by a single bulb hanging from a wire, stood an empty wooden chair facing the window. "There," he said. I stamped the form, wrote the word in the box, and slid it back to him. Then I lifted the gate and let him through, and that night I carried a chair from my own kitchen and set it by my stove, just to see how it looked.