Black ink drawing of a heartbeat trace with hatched peaks and the handwritten words feel them call, drawn on white paper, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Heartbeat line with handwritten script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn heartbeat or ECG trace runs across a pale page, with two small bumps on the left, a tall peak and a deep trough. The peaks are partly filled with fine hatched lines, and the trace continues into handwritten script reading feel them call. The drawing is in black ink on white paper with no colour, and the composition places the line horizontally across the frame.

Lettering Heartbeat Script Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass on the barometer had been falling since midnight, and I wrote it down the way Father taught me, in pencil, because ink runs when the spray gets into the lamp room. Four days out from the Shetland relief run, the sea had started to talk to the rock in a voice I knew better than my own. I kept the log open on the sill and counted the swells against the second hand of the clock.

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The radio man on the mainland had sent word that the Mary Jessop was overdue, and her skipper was a boy from Scalloway called Tam Reid who had never once in his life been late for his tea. I had the pencil in my fist, ready to note the lamp's sweep, when the wireless crackled and gave me a line of nonsense that turned out to be his call sign, broken into dashes and gaps. The dashes came hard, then soft, then hard again, like a man running up a stair and stopping to breathe.

I didn't sleep. At four the swell lifted and dropped, and the light on the water showed a tall grey back and then nothing, then the white ghost of a sail lying over. I wrote down the bearing, the time, the word Reid, and then, underneath, in the square capitals Father would have scolded, FEEL THEM CALL. He used to say it about the sea, that you could feel the drowned men calling in the swell before any bell rang. I had always thought it was a grandfather's nonsense.

At first light the Mary Jessop limped in on the flood with her mast gone and Tam Reid standing at the wheel, grinning like a fool. I put the kettle on and didn't tell him what I had written.