Pen drawing of a heart formed from ribs and a sternum, shaded in dark ink on a cream background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rib cage heart drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a heart whose outline is formed by curved rib bones, with a central sternum-like spine running down the middle. The linework is dark and detailed, with cross-hatched and tonal shading that gives the ribs depth, and the bottom point of the heart tapers into a small bow-like shape. The design is drawn on a plain cream background with no body part visible.

Heart Ribs Bone Skeleton

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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

Gather in close, the rain's coming through the awnings and you'll want to hear this before it runs off the stalls. My grandmother sold eels at this market, and she swore to me the bone-man's heart was made in the thirty-first year of the cold, when the river froze to the pilings and nobody bought anything they couldn't eat.

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The bone-man was called Tobiah Fenn. He worked a bench under the clock arch, cleaning the ribs of sheep and pigs the butchers threw him, boiling them white and sanding them until they showed the lattice of their insides. Each evening he cut and bent them into lantern frames and combs. One wet night a woman came with a single breastbone wrapped in a handkerchief and asked him to make her a heart she could carry without the weight of one.

He took three days. He bent the ribs into a heart, curve over curve, and left a spine down the middle where the lamplight could pass through. At the point, where the ribs met, he tied a small bow of gut thread, because she told him her husband tied his boots that way, double and tight, and never came back to undo them. She paid him a single copper and never returned to the arch.

Here's the turn, and mind the drip. When Fenn put the heart out on the Saturday, the damp had loosened the bow and settled the ribs so the gaps let the grey light through. Every stallholder who looked at it saw the same thing: a cage with nothing caged. My grandmother bought it for a penny and hung it over her eel barrel, and it's still there, if the roof hasn't fallen in.