Close view of a fine line black tattoo of a heartbeat trace with a small heart at its centre, sitting on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heartbeat line with a heart on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline of a heartbeat trace runs across the skin of the ribs, with a small open heart shape rising from the centre of the line. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the tattoo is the only colour ink in the frame against the skin tone. The person lifts a grey sweatshirt with one hand, and the crop shows the torso and tattoo without the face.

Fine line Ribs Heartbeat Heart 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

Pull that stool closer and mind the lamp, it smokes whenever the ship lurches. Sixty-one days out of Liverpool on the Calliope, and a stoker's boy called Ned Harrow had a fever that would not break. Dr Pryce kept a string galvanometer in a walnut box the size of a biscuit tin, with a silver thread so fine you could barely see it. He strapped two wires to the boy's wrists, then watched the shadow of that thread jump across a strip of paper, peak and fall, peak and fall.

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The mate came down every night to look at those strips. He said they put him in mind of the Chilean coast on a chart, all spikes and small hills, and then he'd laugh at himself for saying so. Pryce told him a pulse written down was only a man's pulse written down, nothing more, and the boy would sleep better without anyone talking poetry over his bunk. Still, the mate kept coming.

On the fortieth night the trace went low and thin, and Pryce sat with his watch open in one hand and his pencil in the other for the best part of an hour. Then the thread lifted. It climbed a sharp peak and dropped back, and up it came again, stronger, steadier. Pryce was an unsentimental man, but he drew a little open heart in pencil above the tallest spike, and when the boy woke and asked what the silly thing was, the doctor told him it was where he'd come back to them.

Ned kept that strip folded inside his shirt all the way to Valparaíso. On the quay he found a tattooist with a tray of needles and a sleepy apprentice, and he had the line copied across his ribs, with the heart set just above the peak. He said it was the only thing he'd ever owned that had been written down by someone who wanted him to live.