Black and grey dotwork drawing of an anatomical heart with a carousel and horses on a platform above it, with vessels rising from the top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Carousel on an anatomical heart in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an anatomical heart with its vessels rising from the top, and a carousel with small horses sitting on a ringed platform above it. The forms are built entirely from fine stippled dots that create shading and texture across the heart and the carousel canopy. The image is black ink on a pale background with no colour, and the subject fills the centre of the frame.

Dotwork Heart Horse Anatomical heart Vessel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carousel at Hollin Fell only turned on the nights the wind came off the tops, and Mrs Varley always said it was the horses that wanted their supper. Her grandson Tom had laughed at that until the summer he was sixteen and rode the outside ring alone, after the last tram had gone down the valley. He said the platform hummed under his boots like something breathing through a pipe. He said the little painted horses lifted their heads as he passed, one after another, the way a congregation stands.

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The man who built the ride had been a surgeon before he was a showman, and he had kept a heart in a jar on his workbench, so the old ones claimed. Nobody believed the bit about the jar. Everybody believed the bit about the pipes. Under the canopy, the brass tubes ran up through the roof and out into the cold, and when the gale found them they sang low and wet, like a body with too much blood in it trying to get round.

Tom went up the fell with a torch the following spring to see where the pipes ended. He found them bolted to a limestone outcrop, branching like the roots of an old tree, and below them, half sunk in the moss, a great stone heart the size of a cart. It was still warm. The horses on the ring above had all turned to face the valley, and in the morning the whole village saw them facing the wrong way, towards the fell, as if waiting for something to come home.