Black and grey realism style tattoo across a person's back showing a man in a suit walking a tightrope, with a heart hanging on one side and a brain on the other.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tightrope walker balancing heart and brain on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man in a long coat and top hat walks a taut line across the upper and middle back, holding a pole for balance. A shaded anatomical heart hangs from the left end of the rope and a shaded brain from the right, both drawn with fine outlines and soft grey tones. The composition is in black and grey ink only, and the figure and organs sit centrally across the back with plenty of open skin around them.

Realism Back Heart Brain Man Suit Rope Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire ran from the Gull Stack to the chapel roof, forty yards of tarred hemp that Mr Aldous swore would bear a man's whole weight and his whole argument. I was twelve, sent up the slipway to carry his balance pole, and I remember thinking the sea looked like a lid nobody had troubled to fasten.

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He hung his two pails from the rope before he set foot on it. The left held a heart carved from lignum vitae, dark and heavy as a fist, and the right held a brain moulded in grey wax that the ferry woman had sworn would melt by noon. Mr Aldous settled his top hat, took the pole in both hands and stepped out over the water as if he were crossing his own kitchen. The islanders on the shingle went quiet. The gulls went quiet too, which I have never forgiven them for.

Halfway over, the wax pail began to sway. The rope sang a low note, and I saw his shoulders stiffen under the good black coat. He stopped, and for a long while he did nothing but breathe. Then he looked back at me, not at the crowd, and called out that a man could only carry one thing properly at a time.

He unhooked the brain and let it drop. It went into the sea with barely a sound, a pale smudge turning over and over until the grey took it. The rope rose, the heart swung level, and he walked on to the chapel roof with his arms wide and steady. When he came back down, I asked him what he had kept. He tapped his chest and said, "Only the part that pulls," and the gulls settled again on the empty wire.