Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart with a fading, smudged top edge, set inside a dotted geometric diamond on the forearm.

Stippled heart within a dotted diamond

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an anatomical heart drawn in stippled dotwork, with the upper section softened into dark shading that fades into a blurred, streaked edge. A fine dotted outline of a diamond with interlocking triangles surrounds the heart. The work is entirely black and grey and sits centrally on a pale forearm against a patterned tiled floor.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Heart Diamond Triangle Dot Geometric frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain had sixty-six links and I had counted them every morning since the Michaelmas survey, so when Hannah Pike asked me to stop at the stile, I knew the ground had changed before she said a word. Ashcombe wood did not care to be pegged. Every stake I drove came up again by dawn, leaning towards the church like a man listening at a door.

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I drew it up in the back room of the Rose and Crown with a fine steel nib and Indian ink, one dot for every peg, because the lines bled into the paper whenever I tried to make them solid. By evening I had a diamond of dots with a triangle wedged inside each side, and at its centre a shape I had not meant to make: two heavy lobes, a long slope where the blood would run, and a top edge I could not finish. Each time the nib reached it the ink spread into grey streaks, like breath on a window.

Hannah came up the stairs with a candle and looked over my shoulder. 'That's where the Carver girl went in,' she said, and laid her thumb on the dark smear. 'The wood took what it was owed and gave back the rest.' I asked what it had given back, and she laughed at me the way you laugh at a dog that has dug up a boot.

I finished the diamond that night, every dot in its place, and left the top of the heart as it was. In the morning the pegs stood straight for the first time since Michaelmas, and the ink had dried into something softer than I had drawn, as if the wood had gone over it with a thumb and decided it would do.