Caduceus and stethoscope heart on a forearm
Forearm · Mixed · Photo
A shaded black and grey caduceus with wings and snake coils is centred on the skin. Red stethoscope tubing loops around it to form a heart, with a black ECG trace across the middle and a stethoscope chestpiece at lower right. The word Pacemaker in script runs along the bottom, and the red tubing is the only colour.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Nobody on Ward Seven could say who had left the brass caduceus on the sill above the sluice room, only that it had outlasted three matrons and two refits. One wing was chipped at the tip and the snakes had darkened to the colour of old pennies. Marta Bello, who ran the night cardiac clinic, dusted it on Tuesdays because the cleaners never reached the high ledges.
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On the night the new pacemaker arrived in its sealed pouch, Marta found a length of old stethoscope tubing coiled behind the radiator, red rubber gone stiff as cord. She had meant to bin it. Instead she wound it around the staff, loop after loop, until the tubing made a rough heart and the snakes seemed to be climbing out through the gap at the bottom.
Mr Abernethy in bed four had asked for the device to be explained twice. He wanted to know whether it would keep time or simply keep him. Marta drew him a trace on the back of a observation chart: a spike, a dip, a spike. He tapped the flat stretch between two spikes and said that was the part he was afraid of, and she told him the machine was built for exactly that stretch.
On Thursday his bed was stripped and squared off. Someone had left a single red loop on the sill beside the staff, still warm from the radiator, as if it were the next thing waiting to be wound.
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