Draw a heartbeat (ECG) line, or turn a voice note, song or heartbeat recording into a soundwave. Your audio never leaves your device — everything runs in your browser.
One beat reads as a symbol. Three or more reads as a strip of readout.
Thin lines blur as a tattoo ages. Err thicker than looks right on screen.
Your file is decoded in this browser tab and drawn to a canvas. It is never uploaded, never stored, and disappears when you close the page.
The heartbeat mode draws a PQRST ECG trace and needs no file — it is the right choice if what you want is the shape of a heartbeat rather than one specific sound. The audio mode is for a recording that means something: a voice note, a line of a song, a scan.
Two to four seconds. A whole song flattens into a solid block because every bar ends up near full height; a short phrase keeps visible gaps between words, and those gaps are what make a soundwave read as a soundwave instead of a barcode.
Separate bars are the familiar look. One continuous line is a single unbroken outline of the same wave — far easier to tattoo, and it holds its shape better as ink spreads over the years. Most artists will quietly prefer it.
A line that looks elegantly thin on a screen can close up or blur once it is in skin at wrist size. Push the thickness higher than looks right, then download the PNG and show your artist.
A soundwave tattoo does not play back. There is no audio in the ink. Apps that claim to scan a tattoo and play the sound are a separate paid product storing your file on their servers — if that subscription lapses or the company closes, the tattoo still cannot play anything. Choose the shape because you like the shape.
Short spoken phrases at similar volume produce similar patterns, and a generic ECG trace is a generic ECG trace. The meaning lives in what the sound was, not in the picture being unique. That is fine — just do not expect it to be legible to anyone else.
The ECG shape works hard as part of something bigger: running through a name, out of a date, along the edge of a larger piece. On its own at small size it is very plain, which some people want and some regret.
Long thin artwork has to follow the flow of the limb, and an artist will often stretch, bend or thin the waveform to fit. The PNG here is a faithful starting point for that conversation, not a finished stencil.
A waveform is long and thin, so it wants a long, flat run of skin. The inner forearm is the default and the easiest to read; the wrist suits a single short word or one heartbeat; the ribs take a long line beautifully but curve, so the waveform bends with the body rather than sitting straight. Once you have a PNG you like, the tattoo stencil maker will turn it into printable line art.
No. The file is read and decoded by your own browser using the Web Audio API, drawn to a canvas, and discarded when you leave the page. It is never sent to a server and never stored. That matters here, because a lot of people use a heartbeat scan or a recording of someone they have lost.
No. The tattoo is a picture of a waveform; there is no audio stored in ink. Services that scan a tattoo and play a clip work by holding your audio file on their servers and matching the image — a separate product with an ongoing subscription. If it lapses, the tattoo stays exactly as playable as any other drawing.
None, really. ECG and EKG are the same thing — electrocardiogram, spelled from the English and the German. A heartbeat tattoo usually means the same recognisable spike-and-dip trace. The heartbeat mode here draws that trace procedurally, so you do not need a recording.
Whatever your browser can decode, which in practice means MP3, WAV, M4A and OGG. Decoding uses the browser's own audio engine, so support varies slightly between Chrome, Safari and Firefox. If a file fails, converting it to WAV or MP3 almost always fixes it.
Two to four seconds. Longer clips average out into a solid rectangle of bars, because at that scale almost every bar reaches full height. Trim to the words or the moment you actually want before you bring the file here.
Yes, with no signup. Everything runs in your browser, so it costs us nothing per use and there is nothing to gate. You only need an account if you want to generate a full tattoo design rather than a waveform.