Black ink lettering tattoo of a handwritten medical chart, with labels such as Time, BP, HR and Meds and a heartbeat trace, across the inside of a forearm.

Medical chart fields on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a blank patient chart drawn as ruled lines with handwritten labels including Time, BP, HR, Resp, A&O, A, DOB, Meds and Hx. A heartbeat trace sits at the end of the HR line near the wrist. The lettering and lines are in black ink with even, plain strokes, and the chart runs diagonally across the forearm with a pale scar visible near the wrist.

Lettering Forearm Heartbeat Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 03:10. The 0422 from Crewe has just rattled past the bottom of the car park, and the windows of Ward 9 buzz the way they did when I was a student. I've been on nights for eleven years and I still can't see a blank chart without wanting to fill it in.

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Tonight Dev, the porter, wheeled in a man from the platform steps at Hallam Junction. He'd come down hard on the edge of the stairs, though the man swore he'd only sat down to wait for a train he'd already missed. Dev had the sense to bring the old paper notes from the station first aid cabinet, folded in a plastic wallet, and clipped to them a curl of ECG paper that had come out of the defibrillator in the ticket office. The peaks were still sharp. I held it up to the strip light and thought how every ward whiteboard has a little blue heart drawn on its corner, as if we need reminding.

We filled the form in together, Dev reading numbers off the monitor and me writing in the boxes. Time, 02:51. BP, a hundred and eighteen over seventy-four. HR steady, a little quick. Resp fourteen. A and O times three, and he answered the question about the last train to Leeds better than I could. Meds: none he'd admit to. Hx: he wouldn't say what he'd lost on the stairs, so we left that line empty, because some lines aren't for writing on.

At twenty to four the next train pulled out and the man asked me the time. I looked at the clipboard, where the first box was already full, and told him. He said that was the most useful thing anyone had said to him all night. Dev has taken the plastic wallet back to the cabinet. I kept the strip. It's in my coat pocket now, folded in four, and when I unfold it the spike is still there.