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Achilles tendon

The achilles tendon is the big tendon at the back of the ankle. In the myth of Achilles his mother held him by his ankle and dipped into the magical river Styx to make him immortal, but the bit that he was held by did not get dipped, so it remained his vulnerable spot, or ‘Achilles heel’.

Tissue banks frequently ‘harvest’ this tendon from human donors and it is freeze-dried and stored for transplant (eg to the knee), where it can be used for a variety of purposes to strengthen areas where the natural body tissues have failed. A graft of human tissue from another person is called an allograft.