Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two skeleton hands meeting in a heart shape across the chest, worn by a person in a grey vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton hands forming a heart on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of skeleton hands with bony fingers and rounded knuckles curve towards each other to form a heart across the centre of the chest. The bones are built from fine stippled dots and short lines, giving soft shading and sharp outlines. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on pale skin, with a grey ribbed top and a textured wall behind the figure, and the frame is cropped below the neck and above the waist.

Dotwork Chest Skeleton Hand Heart Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamps are low and the canal won't stop talking tonight. You want to hear about the Hollis sisters who drew bones for the surgeons' college on Carter Street. Their father made the plates, but it was the girls who did the stippling, because a girl's hand is patient, so the old man said, and he was not wrong about the patience.

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Every plate took them a month. They set down a dot for every ridge of bone, thousands of pricks of ink, and the surgeons paid by the dot. Nell worked the left side of the sheet and Ada the right, and they never let their hands touch over the paper, not even to pass the pen. That was their rule. It held until the November the fog came up off the Irwell and stayed a week, and the gaslights went brown in it, and somebody knocked on the studio door at two in the morning with a parcel wrapped in oilcloth.

Inside was a pair of hands, real bones, very old, wired at the wrist by someone who knew how. The porter said a dead man had left them to the college with a note: match them to a heart. Ada laughed. Nell did not. She sat down and began to dot, and by dawn the bones on the paper were curling towards each other, fingertip to fingertip, and between them a space the exact shape of a heart had opened like a window.

When they checked the plate against the hands in daylight, the heart had been drawn across the middle without either sister lifting a pen. Some things are better left to the dark, my friends. Ask me about the spoons next time.