Fine line black tattoo of a heartbeat trace above Italian script reading Sempre nel mio cuore, on the inner forearm.

Heartbeat line and script on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a single thin black heartbeat trace that rises to a sharp peak and then runs flat, with the words Sempre nel mio cuore in a cursive script beneath it. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the ink is a dark grey-black. The arm fills the frame from a close angle, with a metal bangle visible on the wrist behind the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Heartbeat Ecg line Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrow Court could say when the lift started stopping on the eleventh floor, only that it did so at dusk, with a soft knock like someone wanting in. Signora Ferrante lived behind the door at the end of the landing. She had come from Lucca in the year the tower was finished, with a suitcase of letters and a hospital printout folded in her purse. Tomas Reid, who was nine and lived on the sixth, carried her shopping up the stairs every Thursday, because the lift was for emergencies, she said, and groceries were not an emergency.

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One Thursday he found her at the kitchen table with the printout flattened under a saucer. It was a strip of paper covered in black peaks, and at the far end it ran dead straight for a long way. 'That is my husband's heart,' she said, 'on the last afternoon in the hospital. The machine drew it and the nurse tore it off for me.' Tomas asked whether the flat part hurt. She tapped the paper with one finger and said the peak is the part you remember. The line after it is only where the paper goes on being paper.

After that he came on Thursdays for the lessons. She had a pen that wrote in a thin, slanting hand, and she taught him the words one at a time while the kettle ticked: sempre, nel, mio, cuore. Always, in my heart. He practised them on the back of his exercise book until his letters leaned the way hers did.

When the lift knocked for her the following spring, Tomas was already on the landing with the shopping. He did not go in until the nurse had come and gone. Afterwards he found the printout on the table, and beside it a fresh sheet on which she had drawn one peak and one flat line, with the words written underneath in her slanting hand. He took it down to the sixth floor and pinned it above his own kitchen sink, where it stayed.