Black script lettering reading I carry your heart, with a heartbeat line trailing beneath it, on the side of a person's ribs.

Script quote with heartbeat line on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black script reads I carry your heart across the side of the ribs, with a looping flourish under the final letters. A thin black heartbeat line runs from the flourish to the right edge of the frame. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the photo is taken at close range with the subject's grey top lifted to show the tattoo.

Lettering Ribs Script Quote Heartbeat line Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The telegraph clerk at Scrabster had taken the last message of the night without looking up, which suited Ada Mackie fine. Four words, counted and paid for in coppers: I carry your heart. Her husband's trawler, the Clementine, was somewhere past Cape Wrath, and the wireless set aboard was the only thing that could tell her whether he was still breathing under that grey sky.

Keep reading

The answer came nine days later, tapped out in Morse by a lad who had no idea what he was passing along. Mr Tulloch read it aloud from the paper strip, dot and dash, then stopped and frowned at the tape. Every stroke of the stylus had risen and fallen in a jagged line, a pen trying to keep time with something alive. 'Looks more like a pulse than a message,' he said, and he tore off the strip and pressed it into her palm.

Ada did not tell him she had already known it would. Her husband had always said the sea could be read like a pulse if you stood still long enough, and she had stood still on the harbour wall every evening since the Clementine sailed. She folded the strip into her glove and walked home along the shore road, counting the peaks against her own wrist, and somewhere past the lighthouse the two rhythms finally agreed.