Close-up of a fine line script tattoo reading "with every heartbeat" in black ink along a woman's collarbone, near the shoulder.

"with every heartbeat" script along a collarbone

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman's shoulder and collarbone with the phrase "with every heartbeat" written in a flowing cursive script in dark ink. The linework is thin and even, with the words running diagonally across the skin. The background is soft and pale, and the woman wears a loose white crocheted top, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Script Quote Word Heartbeat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had already wrapped the mantel clock in two tea towels when the rain started drumming on the stall awning, and she stood a moment longer than she needed to, listening to the pattering on the canvas as if it might tell her how long the walk to the station would take. Stall nine, the Thursday market, Abergavenny. Her father's bench was in the back of the van with the spare springs and the box of loose hands, and her father was not coming to collect any of it.

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She had found his last letter folded inside the lid of the travelling case. It was a short one, written in the careful slope he used for invoices, and it ended, as all his letters to her had ended since she left for Bristol at nineteen, with the same three words: with every heartbeat. She had always taken it for a sentimental flourish from a man who distrusted sentiment. Now she read it over the bonnet of the van with rain running down her collar and understood it as a plain statement of fact, the way he would describe a mainspring: it keeps going as long as the body does.

She set the clock up on the trestle anyway, because a customer had asked for it. A woman in a yellow mac came under the awning, shook out her umbrella, and touched the case gently. "He always said you'd be the one to finish it," she said. Ruth wound the key, put her ear to the pendulum, and heard it tick, steady and unhurried, and for the first time since the funeral she let the sound fill the whole wet morning.