Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of an anatomical heart with loose, overlapping linework and vessels, on an arm.

Sketched anatomical heart on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sketch-style anatomical heart with its great vessels at the top, drawn in loose, overlapping black lines and shaded strokes. The linework is light and broken in places, with soft grey hatching giving the chamber walls some depth. The design fills most of the frame against plain, lightly lit skin.

Upper arm Heart Anatomical heart Vessel Anatomy Sketch

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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

Sit in close, the lot of you, the rain won't reach under this awning and the bread man still owes me a pie. This is the tale of the drawing man, which my gran had from her gran, and I tell it the way it was told to me, so keep your hands out of your pockets.

Keep reading

He came up from the coast one wet autumn with nothing but a board of cartridge paper and a stub of pencil. He set up between the fishmonger and the clock man who sells clocks that never tick, and every morning he drew a heart. Not a butcher's heart, mind, nor a valentine. The real thing, with its great pipes rising from the top like a tree turned upside down, and he drew them fast, going over each line three times so none of them stayed still.

People paid him a penny to watch and nobody bought the drawings. The afternoons came down grey and the rain ran his graphite into clouds across the paper, and still he shaded the chambers with his thumb until the walls looked thick enough to hold a storm. Once a flower girl asked him why he never finished one. He said a heart is never finished, only put down, and she laughed, and he laughed too, though his hands were shaking.

On the last Thursday he was gone before the stalls opened. The board lay face down by the drain, and when the flower girl turned it over she found the loose lines had slipped off the page entirely, drawn right across the cobbles in wet pencil, looping round the fishmonger's boots and under the clock man's stool. We still see them when it rains, if you look. They never quite close.