Fine line black tattoo of a heartbeat trace above the script words I feel so alive tonight, on the side of a ribcage.

Heartbeat line and script quote on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo shows a heartbeat trace with three sharp spikes running across the top, with the handwritten script phrase I feel so alive tonight beneath it. The lines are thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The tattoo sits centrally on smooth skin along the side of the ribs, with the frame cropped close around it.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Heartbeat Script Quote

Find an artist for this

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 ewe has been straining since the light went, and you have had your arm inside her up to the elbow for the better part of an hour, feeling for a leg that should not be where it is. Frost has crept across the inside of the barn window. Old Dessie from the next farm stands at the gate with a torch wedged under her chin, saying nothing useful, which is exactly what you need from her.

Keep reading

You get the lamb turned. It comes in a slither of blood and cord and lies still on the straw like a wet coat somebody dropped. You clear its nose with two fingers, rub its ribs with a sack the way your father taught you, and count. Nothing. The stove ticks in the corner. Dessie says, "Give it the straw in its ear," and you do, a twist of stalk that makes it sneeze. Then a thin cry, reedy and furious.

You sit back on your heels and realise you have been holding your breath. Your own pulse knocks loud in your ears, quick and uneven, the way it only goes when something has nearly gone wrong and then, mercifully, hasn't. You think of the monitor in the hospital in town last spring, the green line marching across the screen while you watched it as if it were the only honest thing in the room. This is nothing like that. It is just a lamb, wobbling, trying to find its feet.

By dawn the ewe is licking it clean and the sky over the top field has gone the colour of pewter. You walk back across the yard with frost crunching under your boots and the cold scraping your lungs, and you feel every part of yourself at once. Dessie lifts a hand from her car. You lift yours. Behind you the barn door creaks in the wind, and you say it aloud to nobody, the way you might read a line off a card: I feel so alive tonight.