Fine line black tattoo of a heartbeat trace that ends in the word 'life', placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Heartbeat line with 'life' script on chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous black line forms a heartbeat trace across the upper chest, with the trace flowing into the script word 'life' at its right end. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is a dark grey-black against the skin. The close crop centres the tattoo on the collarbone area, with a striped black and white top filling the lower part of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Chest Heartbeat Ecg line Life Script Word

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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

The machine on the third floor of the old infirmary had a paper roll that never quite lined up, so every trace came out a little crooked at the edges. Nobody at the nurses' station minded. Bea Okonedo, who ran the night shift for twenty-two years and could read a rhythm strip upside down across a bedside table, used to say the crooked edges were how you knew a person had actually been there to draw it.

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She kept a folder of the good ones in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, the ones where the line went up and down like a sea wall in a storm and then settled into the flat calm of a sleeper. Her favourite came from a Tuesday in February, a boy of nine who had swallowed a bead and needed watching. His trace jumped and stuttered and then, around four in the morning, drew itself into a clean, steady rise and fall, the same small mountain range over and over, until the monitor's little tone sounded like someone tapping a table with a spoon.

When the day sister asked her to throw the folder out in the spring refit, Bea took one sheet from the top and tucked it into her coat. She did not frame it or pin it up. She simply carried it, folded in four, through the rest of her working life, and on the last morning she unfolded it on the staffroom table, looked at the line running off the edge of the paper, and wrote one word in the margin in pencil, the way the old machines used to print labels on the tape.