Black line drawing of a heartbeat trace with fine script lettering along its length, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Heartbeat line with script wording

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a tattoo design drawn on a plain white background, rotated so the lettering runs vertically. A single black heartbeat-style line with sharp peaks and troughs runs through the centre, and fine cursive script reads along the lower and upper sections. The linework is uniform and thin, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Lettering Heartbeat Ecg line Script Lettering Wording

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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

Sit down, you're letting the cold in. Right. Bay four had a monitor that drew its line in green light, and at three in the morning it went up and down like a man walking home from the pub with his hands in his pockets. Sister Ruth Okonedo said it was the only honest thing on the ward, because it never pretended to know more than it did.

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There was a lad in that bed called Tobias Penhale, a joiner from Redruth, who had come in with his chest bad and his mother asleep in the chair beside him. She had made him promise, she said, that whatever the machine did, he'd keep talking to her. So every hour he told her the same joke about a goat and a bus timetable, and she laughed, and the line jumped. The doctors called those jumps ectopics and didn't think much of them. Ruth thought they were the line checking in.

Near dawn the line went flat for the length of a breath, and everyone on the ward stood still. Then it came back, a ragged peak, then another, and the mother said, "There you are," as if he'd only stepped out for a smoke. Ruth wrote the time on the chart in the dull blue pen they issued, and beneath it, where no clinical box existed, she wrote until the end. The registrar never asked what it meant.

The chart's still in the drawer at the nurses' station, if you want to see her hand. Mind the step on the way out. It's been loose since the flood.