Three black ink heart designs drawn on brown kraft paper: a plain outline heart, a heart containing an anatomical heart, and a standalone anatomical heart.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three heart designs on kraft paper

Black and grey · Flash

Three heart designs are drawn in black ink on brown kraft paper, with lined notebook paper visible at the top edge. The left design is a simple outline heart with even, bold linework. The middle design combines an outlined heart with an anatomical heart shown inside it, and the right design is a standalone anatomical heart with shaded detail along its vessels. The drawings are monochrome and sit loosely spaced across the paper.

Heart Anatomical heart Outline Sketch

Find an artist for this

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

You learned the outline first, because the outline was the only part Mr Pryce would let you keep. Sunday afternoons at the kitchen table, heavy brown paper saved from the butcher's and still smelling of fat, your father's pencil worn short from sharpening with a craft knife. The first heart came out lopsided and bold, drawn the way you did everything before the pit took the certainty out of the men.

Keep reading

The second heart you drew around something. Nan had a library book from the Institute with a plate of a chest opened up, all blue veins and a pale wall of muscle, and you copied it into the shape you already knew how to make. The chemist's fountain pen blotted where you pressed too hard. It looked like something trying to climb out of a box it had been given. Your mam pinned it to the scullery door beside the coal rota, and nobody mentioned it.

The third one you did alone, the winter the lamp room closed and Dad came home early with a cough and no shift. You turned the anatomy plate face down and drew the heart the way it sat in him when he slept: heavy, tilted, shaded along the vessels where the dark got in. You did not draw a shape. You drew what was pulling.

He asked to see it. You held the sheet flat under the lamp until the kraft went amber at the edges, and he traced the thickest line with one blackened thumb, leaving a smudge right over the aorta. 'That's me,' he said, and you said it was only a drawing, and he laughed until he had to hold the table. You kept the sheet. The smudge is still there.