Fine line black tattoo of a heartbeat trace running into the script words Just live, on the upper chest.

Heartbeat line with Just live script

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A single heartbeat trace, with two tall spikes and smaller peaks, runs horizontally across the skin and flows into the cursive words Just live. The linework is thin and even, in dark ink with no shading. The tattoo sits centred on a soft-focus area of skin, with the lettering on the right side of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Chest Heartbeat Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Ashby pegged the paper trace to the greenhouse wall beside the tomato canes, because it was the only place in the shed the damp had not reached. The roll had come home from the cardiac unit in a brown envelope, folded twice, and she had flattened it on the kitchen table the night before. Two tall spikes, a small hump after each, then the long flat rest before the next beat. She had traced it with a fingernail until the paper went soft.

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Her grandson Tom came up the path with a spade over his shoulder and asked why she was staring at a squiggle. She said it was the line the machine had drawn the night his grandfather was taken in, that she had not been allowed to see it live, only the printout. Tom said it looked like a cardiogram. Dorothy said it looked like a man making up his mind. The nurse had written two words across the bottom in biro, and Dorothy had asked her what they were for, and the nurse had said, just live, love, and then gone off to see to someone else.

They dug the bed for the runner beans together, Tom turning the clay while she knocked the lumps out with the back of a trowel. He wanted to know if that was really what the nurse had meant, or just something people said. Dorothy said nurses did not have time for anything they did not mean. Tom said it was a bit much to put on a chest. She said his grandfather had worn a swallow on his forearm for fifty years and never once been embarrassed by it.

When the canes were in she tied the twine across the frame and let the beans climb. By August the leaves had closed over the wall, and the paper had gone the colour of weak tea. She could still find the spikes if she looked, two dark gaps in the green, with the flat stretch running between them like a path nobody needed to walk.