Black and grey pencil drawing of a ribcage shaped into a heart, with the words HERE LIES THE BONES OF A BROKEN HEART across the centre, shown as a tattoo design.

Ribcage heart with lettering

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a human ribcage arranged in the shape of a heart, with the ribs curving outward from a central spine. The ribs are shaded with soft greys and dark pencil hatching to show form and depth, set against a plain white background. The phrase HERE LIES THE BONES OF A BROKEN HEART runs in thin capital letters across the middle of the design.

Realism Ribcage Heart Bone Lettering

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and mind the sugar bowl, because this is the one about Mrs Okonedo on the eleventh floor of Hadley Court and the man who came up the stairwell with a box of bones. You want to know why the lift never works on a Tuesday? Ask her. She'll tell you it's the lift's own heart giving out.

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Dolores Abara had lived up there since the flats went up in 1968, and she had one rule: nobody gets through her door with their heart in their hands. Everybody comes in with it in their chest and leaves with it there, and that's the only sensible arrangement. So when Tomasz Wrenfield knocked one February with a cardboard box under his arm, she kept the chain on and asked what was inside.

He opened the lid. There was a ribcage in there, not a real one, he swore, but carved from something pale and light, curved round like a heart turned upright. The ribs fanned out from a central spine, every one shaded grey as the sky over the car park. His father had made it in a shed in Gateshead and never finished the lettering. Here lies the bones of a broken heart, it said across the middle, and Dolores read it twice.

"Well," she said, "that's a lot of bone for one heart." He laughed, which was the first useful thing he'd done all night, and she let him in. They sat with it on the kitchen table until the kettle boiled dry, and by morning the box was gone from the landing and the lift was humming again. On the fourth floor someone had left a single white rib propped against a door, polished bright as a spoon.