Fine line black tattoo of a heartbeat trace running across two wrists, with the line continuing from one wrist to the other.

Heartbeat line across two wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists sit side by side, with a single black heartbeat trace running across both and continuing from one to the other. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the peaks vary in height. The photograph is taken from above on a light background, with dark nail polish visible on the fingers at the top.

Fine line Forearm Heartbeat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The machine in Ward Four stalled whenever the paper ran low, so Margaret learned to watch the pen rather than the clock. At ten past two the needle stuttered, caught, and went on drawing the same spiky mountain range it had been drawing since midnight. Sister Ruth said the strips went in the sluice bin with the other rubbish, but Margaret had started folding the ones she liked into her apron pocket.

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Edith and Doreen had been in beds six and seven for a fortnight, bickering over the wireless and the window. On the Tuesday, Edith asked for her hand to be held, and Doreen, who had not touched her sister in forty years, stretched an arm across the gap. Margaret saw the two wrists lying almost touching on the blanket and had an idea she was not supposed to have. She moved the leads so both sisters' pulses ran through the one machine, and the pen drew them as a single line, each peak of Edith's answered by a peak of Doreen's.

Edith died before the morning tea trolley came round. The line went flat and then stopped, and Margaret tore the strip off carefully, the way she had been taught never to. She did not put it in the bin. She took it to Doreen, who was sitting up with her hands folded and her face turned to the wall.

Doreen unfolded it on her knee and ran a thumb along the traces, slowly, peak after peak. "Well," she said. "There's the proof, then."