Traditional style tattoo of an anatomical heart with a wrapped band, orange flowers and dark leaves, shown on the forearm.

Traditional anatomical heart with flowers

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dark anatomical heart sits at the centre of the design, with a banded wrap across its upper section and a poppy-like orange flower at its base. Orange and yellow flowers and dark leaves surround the heart, and a larger yellow flower appears at the top of the frame. The bold outlines and solid shading in browns, oranges and yellows give the piece a classic flash look.

Traditional Forearm Heart Anatomical heart Flower Poppy Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The market at Harrowgate Cross sold everything on Thursdays, and Maud Penhallow had been selling seeds from the same trestle for thirty years. The orange ones were marigolds, bright as a cooked yolk, and the dark ones were poppies she collected from the verge behind the cattle sheds. Her customers came for the flowers and stayed for the gossip. Nobody had ever asked her what she kept in the tin under the counter.

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One November a young carter called Tobias Wren came to the stall with a wrapped parcel and a bruise on his jaw. He wanted a heart, he said, the proper kind, the sort you saw in the old books at the chemist's. Maud laughed at him and then, when he did not laugh back, she unwrapped the tin. Inside was a single dark seed pod, shaped like a fist, bound round the middle with a strip of green thread. She told him it had come from a garden her grandmother had kept beside a church that was no longer there.

He paid her in coppers and walked off towards the river with the pod in his coat. Three weeks later he was back, thinner, with a flower pressed flat in a letter. The letter was from a woman in Ledbury who had married a man with a cart and a temper, and who had sent it to say she had planted the marigolds along her wall. Tobias asked Maud whether a heart could be made to grow a second heart, and Maud told him that was not how hearts worked, but that the poppies had always been stubborn about the spring.

In April the verge behind the cattle sheds was red from end to end. Maud walked down with her basket and cut a dozen stems without thinking, the way she always had, and tied them with the same green thread. She left one bunch at the Ledbury road gate and kept the rest for herself.