Hand-drawn marker sketch of a black heartbeat line with a red heart striped in black and white diagonally, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heartbeat line with striped heart

Colour · Flash

A bold black heartbeat trace runs across the image, with a small heart at its centre. The heart is filled with red and crossed by a diagonal black band edged in white. The linework is thick and uniform, and the drawing sits on a pale, slightly textured background with darker vignetting at the edges.

Heart Heartbeat Ecg line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift between the eleventh and twelfth floors had stopped with a shudder Kieran felt in his back teeth. Somewhere above him the cables creaked like an old boat. He pressed the button a third time, gave up, and sat on the floor with his back against the steel wall, a carrier bag of Nana's mangoes between his knees.

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She had given him the pen that morning, a black fine liner from the drawer where she kept the electricity letters. "Draw me something to take up," she'd said, "so you're not staring at the doors." He had done the line first, the way the monitor at the hospital had shown it, spiking and dropping, then a heart in the middle. He coloured it red with a felt tip, got bored of being careful, and laid a black band across it at an angle, leaving a thin strip of bare paper either side. Nana called it their flag. He called it a heart that couldn't make up its mind.

The light flickered and the lift lurched again. He thought of her hand on the arm of the sofa, the blue thread of a vein at her wrist when she told him off for leaving his shoes in the hall. He traced the trace with one finger on the lino, counting the way she'd taught him, fifty-two, fifty-four, then steadying.

The doors opened at a quarter past six onto the twelfth floor, where a man from maintenance was leaning on a trolley with a flask. "You all right in there, son?" Kieran held up the drawing. "It's a heart," he said. "It's still going." The man laughed and held the door, and Kieran stepped out with the mangoes, the paper folded into his pocket and still warm from his hand.