Black fine line tattoo of a heartbeat trace with a bicycle in the centre, on the inner forearm, in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heartbeat line with bicycle on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single unbroken black line forms a heartbeat trace that runs across the forearm, with a simple outline of a road bicycle in the centre. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the bicycle is drawn with open wheels and a clear frame. The photo is in black and white, with a softly blurred dark background behind the arm.

Fine line Forearm Heartbeat Ecg line Bicycle

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 paper came off the drum of the cardiograph in one long unbroken strip, and Mother Ilse would not let me touch it until the ink had dried. In the kingdom of Harrowmere we did not trust machines that talked, but we trusted this one, because the royal physician had bought it from a Lowland clockmaker and it had never once flattered anybody.

Keep reading

The strip showed a rider named Aldo Renn, who carried the king's letters over Cold Stile on an iron bicycle with wheels as tall as a man. The physician wanted him stopped. Every time Aldo reached the crest, the line leapt like a hare, and the physician said a heart that jumped so would one day simply stop in the saddle. Ilse only rolled the paper and said nothing, which was how I knew she had already decided.

So on the first clear morning I took the bicycle up the Stile myself, with the clockmaker's wire clipped to my wrist and a pencil behind my ear. The road bent like a fishing line. At the top the wind came off the grey lake and I felt my own pulse knocking under the wire, quick and loud, then slowing as the wheels began to fall away beneath me. On the descent the paper would have shown a long, level sigh.

When I came back down to the town, Ilse had the new strip pinned to the wall beside the old one. Both traces ran the same shape: a rise, a fall, a rise, a fall, always returning to the same flat line between them. She tapped the spot where the peaks came and said, "That is not a warning. That is a road." The physician, I am told, has still not forgiven her.