Fine line black tattoo of a heartbeat trace that becomes a heart, with a small cross, on the inner wrist.

Heartbeat line and cross on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a single thin black line that rises into a small cross, dips into a sharp heartbeat spike, then loops into an open heart outline. The linework is clean and even with no shading, and the ink is solid black against pale skin. The photo is taken close up on the inner wrist and hand, with a dark floral fabric in the background.

Fine line Forearm Heartbeat Heart Cross 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 paper came off the old cardiograph in a long grey tongue, and Uncle Teddy had kept every yard of it in a biscuit tin under the chart table at the Carrick Quay lifeboat house. I found it the week after the funeral, while the gulls fought over the bins outside and the tide grumbled against the slipway.

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Most of the strips meant nothing to me, just wavering peaks like the outline of hills seen from a boat. Then I found the one he'd marked in red biro: a flat run, a sharp spike, a long quiet slope, and beside it, in his square capitals, DAD HOME. I knew the date. It was the night the Mary Ellen came in through the bar with two men aboard and a wind that had no business being so cold in June.

I pinned the strip above the kettle, and Ray from the crew came in with his flask and stood looking at it for a long time. 'Your uncle said it was the only honest thing in the building,' he said. 'It goes up when you're frightened and it doesn't care who's watching.'

Afterwards I sat on the step and drew the same shape on the back of an envelope, the little cross, the spike, the heart tacked on at the end. The boats were coming up the channel, their lights sliding across the water one after another. I counted them the way Teddy had taught me, by the rise and fall, until the last one was home.