Black and grey realism tattoo of a hand holding strings attached to an anatomical heart, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Marionette hand and anatomical heart on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand reaches down from the top of the frame, with thin strings running from its fingers to an anatomical heart with visible vessels and chambers. The heart is shaded with fine hatching and soft grey tones, with crisp black outlines. The design is centred on the arm against a textured, hatched background.

Realism Forearm Hand Heart Anatomical heart Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Saltergate would sell Mrs Abel a length of waxed thread after dark, so she walked to the cutler's on Tanner Row at midnight, when the gas lamps were low and the gulls had gone quiet on the chimneys. The cutler knew what she wanted before she spoke. He had sold the same blade to her mother, and to his own father, for the same errand: cutting a man's heart loose from the string that had been tied to it at the fair.

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Her husband Tom had been bought by the Master of the Lantern Fair for a shilling and a promise. Since then he had walked the high wire above the market roofs, his chest open to the cold, the heart in it lifting and dropping whenever the great hand over the rooftops moved its fingers. Mrs Abel climbed the fire escape of the bell tower with the knife in her apron. From the top she could see the whole city asleep, and the wooden hand hanging over it like a shopkeeper's sign, its wrist bound with black cord.

She cut the strings one by one. The first three snapped like harp wire. The fourth caught on her thumb and she bled onto the lead of the roof, and the hand gave a jerk that nearly threw her into the square. When the last string parted, the hand fell through the dark and landed on the cobbles with a sound like a dropped Bible. The heart Tom had been carrying fell out after it, and it went on beating on the stones.

Tom came home by dawn with nothing in his chest but a hollow that hummed. The heart kept its slow time on Tanner Row, and by morning the fishwives were stepping round it the way they stepped round a dropped purse. Mrs Abel never went back to the tower. She still sees the hand at the top of the fair some nights, lying still with its fingers curled, and she never once looks up to check whether it is awake.