Black and grey realism tattoo on a person's upper back showing a top-hatted man in a tailcoat balancing on a tightrope between a heart and a brain.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tightrope walker with heart and brain on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man in a top hat and tailcoat walks a tightrope, holding a long balancing pole, with an anatomical heart hanging from one end of the rope and a brain hanging from the other. The linework is fine and clean, with shading built up in dense stippled dots on the heart and brain and softer grey tones on the figure. The tattoo fills the centre of the upper back, and the bare skin around it is shown in a plain, evenly lit frame.

Realism Dotwork Back Heart Brain Top hat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, it swings round every twenty seconds and it'll put you off your stride if you're not used to it. Now, you'll want to hear about Mr Ambrose Vell, who came up the cliff path to Scarrow Head in the spring of 1887 with a tailcoat on his back, a balancing pole over his shoulder and a coil of tarred hemp in a barrow. He meant to string that rope from our gallery rail clean across to the Mare Rock, a quarter mile of nothing but gulls and sea, and walk it. The village laughed. The keeper's wife did not laugh, because she was the one who had to hold the lamp steady while he practised.

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He hung two weights from his pole, one either side, to keep himself true. On the left he tied a heart in oilcloth, given to him by a surgeon in Bristol who owed him money. On the right he tied a brain in a jar, which he said was the only honest thing he'd ever carried. Every morning he stepped out and every morning he came back, wobbling and cursing, with the wind pulling his coat-tails sideways like a pair of hands.

On the seventh day the wind came round from the south-west and the heart began to pull him toward the fish-wife's cottage, where he'd been sleeping on and off, and the brain pulled him back toward the ledgers in Penzance. Halfway across, he stood still for so long that the gulls gave up on him. Then he did a thing none of us expected. He cut the jar loose with his penknife, and watched it drop into the white water below, and walked the last hundred yards with only the heart to keep him level.

He reached the Mare Rock at dusk and sat down on it with his hat in his lap. He never did come back for the jar, and the fish-wife married a cooper from Newlyn. Still, if you climb up to the gallery on a clear night you can see the rope, or rather the line where it used to be, hung across the dark like a stitch that's come undone. Listen. Round and round the lamp goes. Nobody's fallen yet.