Forearm tattoo of a pink awareness ribbon joined to a black heartbeat line, with script lettering reading fuck cancer and small grey letters DECD above.

Cancer awareness ribbon and heartbeat on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a pink awareness ribbon whose loop is drawn in black outline, with a black heartbeat trace running into the script lettering that reads fuck cancer. Above the ribbon, the grey outlined block letters DECD sit at an angle. The black linework is clean and even, the ribbon is filled with a single flat pink, and the design is framed against pale skin on a bent arm.

Lettering Forearm Ribbon Heartbeat Script lettering Initial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maureen kept the ECG strips in a biscuit tin under the reception desk at Ashgrove Ward, rolled and rubber-banded by date, because the trace of a heart looked to her like handwriting nobody had bothered to finish. On Tuesday she unrolled the one from bed nine and smoothed it flat with the side of her hand. Mr Okonedo's peaks were lazy, then sharp, then lazy again, and the ward sister had written DECD across the top in biro before anyone rang the family.

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Nobody on the corridor said the word cancer out loud before lunch. They used the codes on the notes, the little letters that stood for things people were tired of spelling. Maureen had a rule about that: if you could not say a thing plainly, you could at least draw it plainly. So on her break she sat on the fire-door step with a felt pen and a pink card from the stationery cupboard, and tried to make the ribbon loop the way the old man in bed nine used to loop his knitting, over and under, never finishing a row without a grumble.

By the end of the shift the card had a ribbon on it, and beside the ribbon, in capitals that leaned like a bed tipped up for the night, the word she had been taught not to write. She pinned it above the desk where the families would not see it and the porters would. Sister Dunne read it on her way past, stopped, and said nothing at all, which in that building was the closest thing to a standing ovation.