Black and white photo of a fine line heartbeat tattoo on the back of a neck, above a dark top.

Heartbeat line on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small heartbeat trace is tattooed on the back of a neck, with a single spike flanked by smaller peaks and a flat baseline on each side. The linework is thin and solid black, with no shading. The photograph is black and white and centres the tattoo against pale skin and a dark neckline.

Fine line Neck Heartbeat Ecg line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Winter Gardens had gone soft on the slow numbers when Mr Halloran pressed a rolled strip of paper into my hand. "Take that up to Dr Ashby before the lights go," he said, "and don't let anyone fold it." I had been the cloakroom boy there since I was fourteen, which meant I knew every coat and hat in the building and nobody's business but my own. The paper came from the machine the infirmary had lent the doctor, a long grey ribbon of ink, and whoever it belonged to had left a faint black record of their heart on it.

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I carried it up the back stairs under the chandeliers, my thumb pressed to the edge so the curl wouldn't spring loose. Dr Ashby was leaning on the gallery rail with a cup of tea that had gone cold hours ago. He unrolled the strip along the wood and we both looked at it. There was one tall spike, sharp as a pin, with two smaller humps either side and flat ground stretching out to nothing. "Steady as a metronome," he said. "Whoever this is can stop worrying." The name was typed in capitals across the top, and I had read it before I could stop myself. I didn't say it aloud.

Downstairs the band began a foxtrot, and Irene came up the steps looking for her wrap, which she had left in my care along with her gloves and a half-eaten bag of barley sugar. She saw the paper in my hand and laughed at the spike. "Looks like a bad day on a dance floor," she said. Then she took the strip from me, held it against the light from the stairwell and studied it for a long moment, the way she studied a new record before she let it spin. The flat parts were the only parts I could see. She handed it back, took my hand, and we went down to where the drummer was counting us in, one beat and then the pause before the next.