Fine line black tattoo of a city skyline with a tall spire, ending in a heartbeat line with a small red heart, on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

City skyline and heartbeat line on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black fine line tattoo shows a city skyline with a tall central spire, drawn as a continuous line that flows into a heartbeat-style trace on the right. A small red heart sits at the end of the trace, the only colour in the design. The tattoo is photographed flat on pale skin against a grey textured background, with the wrist centred in the frame.

Fine line Forearm City skyline Skyline Spire Heartbeat line Heart City

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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

Mind the stair, it's older than the both of us, and sit where the radiator knocks. Right. You want the one about the needle and the nurse, is it? Everybody wants that one.

Keep reading

Her name was Ruth Abernethy and she worked nights on the fourth floor of the hospital that sat on the hill above the river, where the city lights ran down to the water like spilt sugar. Every night she walked the length of the ward with a clipboard and a torch, and every night from her window she could see the tower across the water, the tall one with the spire pointing at nothing, which the old men called the Needle and the young ones called nothing at all. She said it looked like a heart monitor's wave that had stood up and decided to become a building.

One night a boy came in off the bridge with a cut on his palm and a pulse the machine kept losing. Ruth sat with him while the lines on the screen jumped and fell. He asked her what the city looked like from up there, and she told him the truth: that it looked like a line someone had drawn without lifting the pen, going up and down and up again, and that the only red thing in it was the tail-light of the last bus home. He laughed, and his pulse came back on the screen, steady as a clock.

Ruth told that story to everyone for thirty years, and they always asked what happened to the boy. She never said. What she did was keep a single red pencil in her breast pocket, and when a line ran flat in the small hours she would circle the beat that came after it, the way you circle the one good word on a page. Mind the step on your way out.