Black fine line tattoo of a cross joined to a heartbeat trace that ends in an outlined heart, placed on the side of the body above a dark waistband.

Cross, heartbeat line and heart on the side

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous black line forms a Latin-style cross on the left, a heartbeat trace with sharp peaks in the centre, and an open outlined heart on the right. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, and the ink sits crisply on pale skin. The tattoo is framed against the edge of dark fabric at the top of the frame, with plain skin filling the rest of the image.

Fine line Ribs Cross Heartbeat Heart 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 pit wheel at Carrick Hollow stopped for the first time in forty years the week the bell rang for Tomas Brannan, and the women of the row said afterwards that the quiet was worse than the dust. Old Mair Penhale took the lamp down from its hook and walked up the lane to the chapel with it unlit, because a lamp was for finding your way and she knew every stone of that road already.

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She had a line in her head that day, a long thin thing her grandmother had told her about, how a man's life drew itself on the pulse like a seam of coal in the rock. Every beat a pick strike, every pause a shift underground. Nobody believed the grandmother. But Mair had sat by Tomas's bed at the cottage with two fingers on his wrist and counted the flutter until it went slack, and she had seen the shape of it, sharp and then still.

At the chapel she found the minister had nailed a plain cross above the door, the same cross the men had carried on the day of the flood, and beside it someone had chalked a heart. It was crude and it was not finished, but it was there. Mair laughed for the first time since Tuesday, a dry sound like a boot on shale.

She went home and found a sheet of brown paper and drew the thing as she had seen it: the upright cross, the three sharp beats, the heart at the end where the line curled back. She pinned it to the kitchen wall beside the calendar. When the bell rang again the next morning for the next shift, she was already at the window, watching the wheel turn over, and she did not reach for the lamp.