In conventional photoacoustic (PA) imaging, the tissue absorption coefficient is usually considered to be a non-directional scalar constant, and its anisotropic optical absorption characteristics are ignored. Herein, we propose an anisotropic PA microscopy (A-PAM) technique that uses two linearly polarized light beams perpendicular to each other as the excitation source for PA imaging. Subsequently, we develop the A-PAM imaging system and verify the feasibility of the proposed method using phantoms that exhibit different forms of anisotropic optical absorption. Furthermore, we demonstrate the imaging ability of this method using biological samples that exhibit anisotropic absorption. Results show that the proposed method can be easily implanted into the conventional PAM imaging system, expanding the range of information extracted using conventional PA imaging.