Black ink tattoo of a bare tree above a vertical cross, with a heartbeat line running across it, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree, cross and heartbeat line on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a leafless tree with thin, branching lines sits above a vertical cross. A heartbeat trace runs horizontally through the base of the cross, with sharp peaks and troughs of even weight. The image is a close, straight-on photograph on a plain skin background, with only black ink visible.

Forearm Tree Branches Cross Heartbeat Ecg line

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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

You find the roll of paper in the bottom of the lodger's trunk the week after Mrs Pellow leaves for her sister's in Penzance, and you know what it is before you unfold it: thin black ink, peaks like the teeth of a saw, a line that dips flat and then lifts again as if it had only paused for breath. Someone has written a date in pencil along the margin, 14 October 1961, and beneath it, in a hand you recognise from the rent book, the word Gorsey.

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Gorsey was the elm at the top of the cliff path, the one the gale took the winter you came to Sandmere House as a bride. You remember the stump, grey and split, and the way the lodgers used to sit on it to watch the boats come in. A plain wooden cross had been nailed to its trunk since before the war, and nobody ever asked whose it was. You carry the paper down to the kitchen, lay it flat on the scrubbed table under the lamp, and count the peaks against the clock on the wall.

They match. Every spike falls where the kettle ticks, and the quiet troughs sit exactly where the wind drops away from the glass. You think of the Dorrington boy who lodged with you one August and said that trees keep time for the sea, and you laughed at him, and now you do not laugh at all, because the line keeps running past the edge of the table and off the paper into nothing.

In the morning you fetch the good scissors and cut the strip. You pin the longest length above the sideboard, where the elm would have been seen from the window, and leave the rest rolled in the drawer for whoever comes back for the room.