Black fine-lined heartbeat trace with two crosses, a pink ribbon loop and the script text Proverbs 31:25 on the inner forearm.

Heartbeat line with crosses and ribbon

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a heartbeat trace drawn as a thin black line, with a small black cross at each end of the trace and a pink ribbon loop sitting over the centre. Script text reading Proverbs 31:25 runs vertically beside the ribbon. The shading is light and the image is a close, straight-on photo of the inner forearm against a warm, dim background.

Forearm Heartbeat Cross Ribbon Script Scripture reference Ecg line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the fire's had its supper and it wants another log. Aye, that's it. Now you'll have heard about Hollin Wood, where the path gives up at the third stile. Folk in Brackden say the wood keeps a thread strung between two crooked oaks, and if you stand still at dusk you can hear it ticking like a clock in an empty kitchen.

Keep reading

Ada Penrose was the mapmaker's girl, sent out with a chain and a ledger to prove the wood was only wood. She found the thread where two black stumps stood, each one capped with a cross some carpenter had nailed there long ago. The thread ran between them, fine as spider silk, and it pulsed. Up and down, a sharp peak then a long low valley, and every peak was somebody in Brackden, though she could not yet tell who. She wrote the numbers down. They quickened when the thread ran thin, and slowed when it thickened, and she did not like what that meant.

The week the baker's wife took to her bed, the trace in the ledger went jagged, a stutter like a dropped stitch. Ada ran the whole way out. Someone had been there before her. Pinned to the middle of the thread hung a pink silk ribbon, knotted twice with a care that was almost stubborn. Ada looked at it for a long time. Then she unpicked the knot, passed the ribbon round the thread and tied it again, tighter, the way her grandmother bound a splint.

The line steadied. Down in Brackden the bakery shutters rattled open at the usual hour, and the baker's wife was out in the yard complaining about the cold. Ada still keeps the ledger. At the top of each page she copies the same words, strength and honour, and she has never once seen the wood laugh at the days to come. It only ticks, patient as ever, and waits for the next hand to come along and tie a better knot.