Red line tattoo of an anatomical heart with blossoms and leaves on the forearm, in a botanical engraving style.

Red anatomical heart and flowers on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red linework tattoo on the forearm shows an anatomical heart with its vessels visible, rising into a cluster of blossoms, a larger peony-like flower and leaves. The lines are even and engraved-looking, with fine hatching and dotted shading on the heart. The single ink colour is set against green foliage and a red bromeliad in the background.

Botanical Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Flower Blossom Peony Leaves Vessel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been cutting the same vein for three days when Mr Pettifer came down to the engraving room with the proof and a face like weather. "Too thin," he said, tapping the copper. "The customer wants it to read from the back of the shop." The customer was a seedsman in Lewes who sold bulbs by the sack and had decided his catalogue cover should show a human heart climbing out of a bed of peonies. Ada had argued that hearts did not grow flowers. Pettifer had said hearts did not sell seed either, and that was why she was paid by the plate.

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She took the red ink from the cupboard, the pot Pettifer kept for rubrics and saints' days, and rolled it thin across the plate. The paper went down under the press with a sigh. When she peeled it away, the heart lay there in its fine crosshatching, every vessel drawn with the same care she gave the lilies, and the blossoms spread above it like a sentence finishing itself.

Pettifer held the sheet to the window and said nothing for a long time. Then he laughed, short and surprised. "Look at the roots," he said. Ada looked. Where the great vessel curled down, her hatching had run on without her, through the margin and out into the cheap paper, so the arteries had become fine pale threads reaching for soil that was not drawn in at all.

She signed the proof that evening, A. Quarrie sc., in the corner where the engraver's name belonged. It was the first time she had put her name to anything that was not a dead man's anatomy. The seedsman paid for twelve hundred copies and never once asked why the heart was red.