Pencil drawing of a winged anatomical heart beneath a crown, with skulls, a triangle and an eye, in a dotwork and geometric style, shown as a tattoo design on aged paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged anatomical heart with crown and eye

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pencilled tattoo design shows an anatomical heart with wings spread on either side, topped by a crown and set within a large triangle. Two skulls and a sketched anatomical head sit above, and below the triangle an eye is surrounded by stippled dotwork and fine branching lines. The drawing is in greyscale on a sepia, stained paper background, with the composition centred and symmetrical.

Dotwork Geometric Heart Wing Crown Skull Eye Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drawings were due at the printer's by Monday, but Professor Lusk had gone quiet since the spring, and the sheets would not lie flat. Hester Vane weighted the corners with lead type and tried again. Every plate carried the same design: a heart with its wings spread, a crown balanced above its vessels, a triangle drawn so carefully that she could find no slip of the pencil in it. The skulls above were copied from the Museum's cabinet. The eye at the bottom was not copied from anything.

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'Leave the eye,' he had told her in April, when she asked why the lower panel looked unfinished. 'It is only waiting for the right hand.' She had taken that for one of his lectures and not for a plan. The dotwork beneath it had been stippled with a fine nib, thousands of points, so that the paper seemed to breathe in the lamplight. The stains on the sheets were the colour of weak tea. Some of them, she noticed, were not stains at all but small round specks that lifted under her thumb and clung to her skin.

She sat down with the pen he kept in the drawer. The room smelled of formalin and coal smoke. She inked the eye in one clean stroke, and the dots beneath it stirred, drawing inward toward the pupil like iron filings to a magnet. Upstairs a door closed. The professor's chair creaked, as though someone had just risen from it.

On Monday the printer's boy came back with the proofs. Every sheet had the eye inked now, and beneath it, in Lusk's careful hand, someone had written Hester's name.