Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart wrapped in octopus tentacles, with the word desillusions, on the ribs.

Octopus wrapped anatomical heart on ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of an anatomical heart with an octopus wrapped around it, its tentacles curling over the surface and around the valves. The shading is built from stippled dots and fine hatching, giving the heart and tentacles a textured, engraved look. The design is in black and grey only, with the word desillusions across the lower centre, and it sits on the side of a torso in a grey bra.

Dotwork Ribs Heart Octopus Tentacle Anatomical heart Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias had cut the same heart forty times before the octopus crept onto the copperplate, and still the valves sat wrong. He worked by the window of the Penzance print shop with a burnisher in one hand and a loupe screwed to his eye, stippling tiny dots until the metal went grey as a winter sea. Mr Quick, the master engraver, leaned over his shoulder and sniffed. "Lighter on the tentacles. You're drowning the poor thing."

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The commission had come from a surgeon's widow in Newlyn who wanted a plate for her husband's unfinished book, a heart crowned with some creature she would not name. "Make it feel like a letting go," she had said, pressing a shilling onto the counter and not looking at it. Tobias did not understand her, so he drew what he knew: arteries like wet rope, suckers like coins pressed into wax. Beneath the heart he cut a line of script, desillusions, because she had insisted on the French and he had wanted to be obliging.

On the last night he sat with the plate and a guttering candle, and the dots seemed to shift when he turned his head. He thought of his father, who had once hung on to a net for an hour rather than let the catch slide back into the bay. Some things, his father used to say, are kept too long because letting go would mean admitting the work was for nothing.

In the morning he inked the plate and pulled a proof through the press. When he lifted the paper, the octopus had printed backwards, its grip reversed, wrapped around the heart from the inside. Tobias studied it a long while, then left it that way and wiped his hands.