Part of the With What family
Exercise With What

Region

Leg

Below the knee: the calf that pushes you off the ground, and the muscles that steer and steady your foot.

11 structures · 9 muscles · 2 joints

The calf — gastrocnemius and soleus converging into the Achilles tendon at the heel.

Muscles of the back of the leg.

That is the plate’s own caption, as printed in the 1918 edition.

Henry Vandyke Carter, plate 438 of Anatomy of the Human Body (Henry Gray, 1918). Public domain — file on Wikimedia Commons.

This plate labels the tendons behind the ankle Peronæi longus et brevis. The records here call those muscles fibularis longus and fibularis brevis, which is the name Terminologia Anatomica uses. Same two muscles, a century apart.

Bone structure

  • Tibia
  • Fibula

Key functions

  • Ankle dorsiflexion
  • Ankle plantarflexion
  • Foot eversion
  • Knee flexion
  • Knee extension
  • Knee rotation
  • Knee internal rotation
  • Foot inversion

Muscle structure

Joints

Tendons and attachments

Fibularis brevis
from Lower two-thirds of the lateral surface of the fibula
to Tuberosity at the base of the fifth metatarsal
Fibularis longus
from Head and upper lateral surface of the fibula
to Medial cuneiform and the base of the first metatarsal, crossing the sole of the foot
Gastrocnemius
from Medial and lateral condyles of the femur, above the knee
to Calcaneal tuberosity, via the calcaneal tendon
Plantaris
from Lateral supracondylar line of the femur, above the lateral head of gastrocnemius
to Calcaneal tuberosity, medial to the calcaneal tendon
Popliteus
from Lateral condyle of the femur, within the knee joint capsule
to Posterior surface of the tibia, above the soleal line
Soleus
from Posterior surfaces of the head and upper shaft of the fibula, and the soleal line of the tibia
to Calcaneal tuberosity, via the calcaneal tendon
Tibialis anterior
from Lateral condyle and upper lateral surface of the tibia, and the interosseous membrane
to Medial cuneiform and the base of the first metatarsal
Tibialis posterior
from Interosseous membrane and the adjacent posterior surfaces of the tibia and fibula
to Navicular tuberosity, with slips to the cuneiforms, cuboid and middle metatarsals
Triceps surae
from Three heads — two from the femoral condyles (gastrocnemius), one from the tibia and fibula (soleus)
to Calcaneal tuberosity, via the calcaneal tendon

Movements that load it

Where this came from

Every name, attachment and action on this page is read from The Atlas’s own records — each one checked against Terminologia Anatomica, and each one linked above so you can read the full entry. Nothing here is retyped or approximated, so this page cannot drift from the collection: it is the collection, arranged by region.

The figure is different in kind: it is sourced, not drawn here and not generated. A diagram is a claim, and an invented one is a claim nobody can check — so the plates are Henry Vandyke Carter’s, engraved for the 1918 edition and long out of copyright, credited above with a link to the file so you can verify the licence yourself. Being 1918, they carry the anatomical names of their day, which do not always match the modern ones used in the records.

Plate captions were read from the Internet Archive’s scan of the 1918 edition (anatomyofhumanbo00grayrich), and the licence of every plate was checked against its own file record on Commons rather than assumed from the age of the book. The build refuses to publish a page whose plate is not public domain.