Two people's ankles show matching black heartbeat line tattoos outlined in red inside a heart, one on each ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching heartbeat hearts on ankles

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

Two ankles are shown side by side, each with a black heartbeat trace running across a red outlined heart. The left heart sits smaller and lower on the ankle, while the right one is larger and angled toward the foot. The lines are solid and even, with the red outline providing the only colour against the skin and a plain carpeted background.

Ankle Heartbeat Heart Matching tattoo

Find an artist for this

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 ladders are still wet from the morning, so you hold the foot of the one leaning against the Bramley while Tam climbs, because he is the one who never looks down. Late August has settled over the orchard the way it does in Herefordshire, wasps drunk on the windfalls, the grass gone the colour of toast. Behind the packing shed the cricket is on the radio with the volume turned low, and your gran's dog keeps lifting its head at nothing.

Keep reading

Your grandfather kept a strip of paper from the hospital in the cider-house drawer, folded into quarters and gone soft at the creases. Nobody knew what it was until the summer he died, when Tam unfolded it on the trestle and weighted the corners with a jam jar of rusted nails. It was a line that climbed, dropped, climbed again. Grandad told you once that it was the night the hail flattened the top field, and that his heart had behaved like the trees, bent and stubborn, then upright again by morning.

That evening you sat on the step of the shed with a biro and copied the spikes onto each other's ankles, pressing so hard the ink bit into the skin. You drew the hearts round them in red felt-tip, which Tam swore would last longer than the proper stuff. When you finished, the two lines didn't quite match. Yours sat a little lower and sloped toward the path, as if it had been carrying baskets all day. Tam said that was the whole point. You pulled the last windfall out of the grass, bit into it, sharp and cold, and pretended you couldn't feel the rhythm of it through the boards.