Black and white photo of fine-line script reading 'with every heartbeat' across a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

With every heartbeat script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person with long blonde hair is photographed from behind, showing a fine-line script tattoo reading 'with every heartbeat' across the upper back. The lettering is thin, dark and slightly slanted, with a hand resting on the shoulder at the right edge of the frame. The black and white composition is soft and uncluttered, with the text as the clear focal point.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Quote Heartbeat Text

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

Hob came down from the charcoal clearing with his hands black to the wrist and asked Maud Pellow for the thing his grandmother had promised him. "Say it plain," he said, "the way you'd say the bread is done." Maud was the only one in Ashcombe who could cut letters into bark so that the wood healed around them, and the only one who knew old timber kept its promises longer than people did.

Keep reading

She took him past the last stile to the beech that leaned over the brook. Its bark had split long ago, and a pale seam ran down one side where a girl called Ellen Wray had carved her sweetheart's name before he went to sea and never came back. Maud had no wish to cut a name. She sat with her knife across her knee and listened: water over stones, a woodpecker somewhere, quick and light, and Hob's breath still ragged from the climb.

"Every heartbeat," she said at last. She cut the words slow and narrow, leaning the letters over the way her mother had taught her, so the script ran slantwise like rain falling off a roof. "Not for a woman who's gone. For you, while you're the one doing the counting."

Hob asked what it would cost him. Maud shrugged and wiped the blade on her apron. Bark takes no payment, she said, only time. Years later the children of Ashcombe claimed the beech had grown a finger's width for every word, and that if you pressed your ear to it at dusk you could hear something ticking under the bark, slow and steady, that was not the brook.