Black line drawing of a heartbeat trace forming a cross that ends in a heart, with the words Faith, Hope, Love beneath it on a white background.

Heartbeat cross with Faith, Hope, Love

Black and grey · Flash

A black single-line drawing of a heartbeat trace shaped into an upright cross on the left, with a spike and a loop that curves into an outlined heart on the right. The words FAITH, HOPE and LOVE in small capitals sit centred underneath. The linework is solid black on a plain white background with no shading or colour, and the design is centred with generous margins.

Cross Heartbeat Heart Ecg line Faith Hope Love Text

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cable. You know the ward at the aft end, where the old chart recorder still hums behind the glass? Long before your grandmothers were born, a nurse named Halima Stroud kept the night watch there with one lamp and a roll of paper that fed out of the machine like a pale tongue. Nobody on Lantern Deck had seen a heartbeat drawn on paper in twenty years. They trusted the green numbers on the wall, and the numbers had started to lie.

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The night the coolant failed, eleven hundred people slept in their cradles while a man named Corin Ashby was carried in grey as ash, his chest barely lifting under the sheet. Halima clipped the leads to him herself. She did not look at the numbers. She watched the paper. A line came crawling out of the recorder, flat at first, then one hard spike that stood up like a post, then a small rising hump that faltered, then a long curl that bent back on itself like a loop of thread. She tore the strip free and held it to the lamp, and saw that the spike crossed the flat line like a stroke of a pen, and the curl had folded itself into a heart.

She did not pray out loud. She talked to him instead, the way you talk to a stubborn engine, telling him the three things she had left in her pocket: that the deck would hold, that the morning shift would come, and that somebody was still awake for him. The paper kept feeding. Each beat drew its little cross and its little heart, over and over, until the sky-glass in the corridor began to brighten with the false dawn we use now.

In the morning Corin opened his eyes and asked for water. Halima pinned that strip above his bunk with a sewing needle, and it is still there, yellow as old bone, behind the glass where the machine hums. Touch it gently when you pass. The line is still beating, if you know how to read it.