Fine black line tattoo of an ECG heartbeat trace with a wave in the middle, placed across the upper chest below the collarbone.

ECG line with a wave on the collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous black line forms an ECG-style heartbeat trace, with two sharp spikes either side of a rolling wave shape. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, sitting on pale skin across the upper chest and collarbone area. The tattoo is centred horizontally in the frame and the photograph is taken close up with soft, natural light.

Fine line Chest Heartbeat Wave Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train through Porthennick halt is the 23:42, and it stops for under a minute, so I'm never on the platform to see it go. I'm in the lamp room with the kettle on and the timetable still pinned by the door in my father's careful capitals. He ran this halt for thirty-one years before the cuts, and under the counter he kept a pad of squared paper for drawing the tide in pencil, one long line for each day.

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The ward sister rang from Truro in the flat voice people use for news that has already happened. She said the monitor had shown two sharp drops, and then the line had rolled back up like nothing had happened. I asked her what it looked like, and she said it looked like a heartbeat, the spike and then the slow swell. I told her he would have hated being described by a machine.

The pad is still under the counter. I took it out on the third night and turned the pages until I found the last sheet, which had nothing on it but a single stroke at the top and a half-finished wave, as if he had stopped to light a pipe. Beside it he had written the time of the tide and, underneath, in smaller letters, the word tonight.

I pinned that sheet up beside the clock. At 23:40 I heard the rails start to sing, and I went out with the lamp and stood where he used to stand, watching the carriages slide past in a long dark roll.