In many applications a source of the blackbody radiation (BBR) can be highly anisotropic. This leads to the BBR shift that depends on tensor polarizability and on the projection of the total angular momentum of ions and atoms in a trap. We derived a formula for the anisotropic BBR shift and performed numerical calculations of this effect for Ca+ and Yb+ transitions of experimental interest. These ions were used for a design of high-precision atomic clocks, fundamental physics tests such as the search for the Lorentz invariance violation and space-time variation of the fundamental constants, and quantum information. Anisotropic BBR shift may be one of the major systematic effects in these experiments.