Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three hearts on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three hearts run in a row along the forearm. The first is a simple single-line outline, the second is an outline that gradually gives way to shaded anatomical detail, and the third is a fully shaded anatomical heart with vessels and textured surfaces. The image is black and white and shows a close view of the arm against a plain wall.

Fine line Realism Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Lockhart wanted the hearts drawn by Michaelmas, and he wanted them to look like nothing I had ever put on copper. I was nineteen and had spent two years cutting shop signs for the Cowgate printers, so a heart was a simple thing to me: a line round a shape, the way a child draws one on a valentine. He laughed when I showed him the first plate. He told me to go down to the Royal Infirmary and sit at the back of the dissecting room until I could say where the blood went.

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I did not go to the Infirmary. I went to the fishmonger's in the Grassmarket, where a porter named Dougal sold me a sheep's heart for a shilling and a bottle of his sister's gin. I kept it on a board by the window for a week, turning it under the light and drawing it badly, then less badly, until the tangle of vessels made sense to my hand if not yet to my eye. The second plate took a month. I learnt the shading from the hatching on old harbour charts, a thousand small strokes to make a wall turn round.

Lockhart took the third plate without a word and held it to the window for so long I was certain I had spoiled it. Then he asked who had drawn the inside, and I said I had. He grunted and said he would need every plate in the book done the same way, because he could not find another man who would sit with a sheep's heart for a week.

That night I took the first plate home. It was the plain outline, the only heart I had drawn without knowing what lay beneath it, and I found I could not bring myself to add to it. I still have it in the drawer, the line clean and empty, the way I used to see the world.