Black and grey fine line tattoo of an anatomical heart on the side ribs, with a thin ECG heartbeat line trailing to the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart with heartbeat line on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey anatomical heart sits on the left, with fine vessel detail and soft grey tones. A single thin black line runs to the right, forming a heartbeat trace with three sharp spikes. The tattoo is shown up close on bare skin at the side of the torso, with a light blue garment at the top edge of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Heart Anatomical heart Heartbeat Ecg line

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The needle has been scratching across the smoked paper since before the night shift went down, and Mr Pryce says you are to copy every wander of it into the ledger before the cage comes up. You have never liked the seismograph house. It smells of paraffin and wet coal, and the drum turns with a patient tick that gets into your teeth. Still, you sit on the upturned crate with your pencil sharpened to a point and try to keep your hand as steady as the machine.

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For an hour the line is a flat grey thread, the way a sleeping animal breathes. Then it jumps. Three sharp spikes, close together, and each one lifts your own pulse into your throat. Pryce leans over your shoulder, reads the marks, and goes quiet in the way men do when they have stopped pretending. Somewhere under the Ffynnon seam, sixty fathoms down, the roof has come in on the east heading, and the men who were singing at the face are either pinned or already walking home.

You know the code the lads use, because you grew up with it: three knocks on a pipe means we are here, come and dig. Nobody has knocked on anything. The machine only hears the ground. So you draw what it gives you and nothing more, a careful copy of three sharp breaths, and you write the time beside them in your best hand.

At half past four the cage bell rings twice. You take the ledger up the shaft steps with the paper folded inside, and the last spike is still sharp in your mind when Mrs Hughes at the top asks whether anyone is coming up. You hand her the sheet and say, not yet.