Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a heart split diagonally, with an anatomical heart above and a brain below, placed on the chest.

Split anatomical heart and brain on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A heart is divided by a diagonal white line, with the upper half drawn as an anatomical heart showing vessels and chambers, and the lower half as a brain with folded grooves. The linework is bold and outlined, and the forms are built up with fine stippled dots for shading. The design is entirely black and grey and sits centred on the chest against plain skin.

Dotwork Chest Heart Brain Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gym at Pemberton Hall still smelled of floor polish and cheap crisps, and I spotted Ruth Calloway by the squash trophies before she spotted me. Twenty-two years since we shared a lab bench in the old science block, pretending to follow Mr Gillespie's diagrams on the board.

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Gillespie had a habit of splitting things in half. He bought sheep's hearts from the butcher in Morpeth, cut them lengthways on a steel tray, then laid a ruler across the wet muscle and drew a line with a wax pencil. 'Head or heart,' he'd say. 'Everyone thinks they know which one they run on.' Ruth always said heart. I always said brain, just to annoy her.

We talked about jobs and divorces and whether the tuck shop still sold sherbet lemons. Then she held out her phone and showed me a photograph of an ink design: a dotted black heart with a brain folded into its lower half, a clean white stripe running between them. Stippling as fine as sand where the chambers swelled, smoother grooves where the grey matter wound round. 'Gillespie would have said it was the wrong way round,' she said, and laughed in a way that told me she had stopped being angry years ago.

Somewhere across the hall a microphone squealed and someone asked for the old lectern to be wheeled out. Ruth tapped the white stripe with a fingernail. 'Which half do you think he kept for himself?' I didn't answer. I put my hand flat on the table between our cups, and that seemed to be answer enough.