Black and white photo of a fine line heartbeat tattoo on the back of a neck, below hair worn up in a loose bun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heartbeat line on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the back of a person's neck and shoulders, with dark hair gathered up in a loose bun and a grey knit top at the bottom of the frame. A small heartbeat or ECG-style trace sits centrally on the nape, drawn in thin, single black linework with a few sharp peaks. The tattoo is the only ink in the frame, and the monochrome photograph shows soft, even lighting with the rest of the skin left clear.

Fine line Neck Heartbeat Neck

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

Sit yourselves down by the stove and mind the kettle, for I'll not tell this twice. You want to know why the tide gauge on Skerrick Rock had a pen that never sat still. It was a brass drum turned by clockwork, with a steel nib riding a sheet of paper, and as the sea rose and fell it drew a line across the squares like a scratch of lightning. Keepers read it the way you'd read a face. Flat meant calm. A jag meant the swell was running hard off the Atlantic.

Keep reading

Mrs Ada Penhallow kept that light the winter her husband Tom went out after the pilchards and did not come back to the slip. She climbed the stairs each evening with the lamp oil and the ledger, and each evening she checked the drum. Nothing came in but weather. Then one February night, with the glass falling and the wind up, the nib began to leap in short, sharp peaks, three and a pause and three again, so close together that the paper filled with them.

She sat at the gauge with her hand flat on the brass until dawn, because she knew a boat was out there, and because the pattern was too regular to be weather. The iron ladder carried every knock down through the rock into the pipe, and someone out past the reef was beating a bolt against a hull to keep the rhythm going. At first light the lifeboat crew found a small open boat drifting inside the breakers, one oar lashed to the thwart, and two men alive in it. Tom was one of them. The line on that paper, she always said, was the only thing that ever told her where to look.