Fine line tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist showing a stethoscope with a red heart chest piece, a grey nurse cap and a pink heartbeat trace.

Stethoscope, heart and nurse cap on wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist shows a black fine-line stethoscope curling around a red heart chest piece, with a grey-shaded nurse cap on the right. A thin pink heartbeat trace runs between the stethoscope and the cap. The linework is delicate and the red and pink accents stand out against the grey and black shading, with the design centred on pale skin.

Fine line Forearm Heart Heartbeat line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the one about Nurse Ada Pell and the hospital barge Mercy that tied up at Ferrymead the winter the river came over the towpath. You'll have heard it told wrong in the Swan. They say she sewed a man's hand on the cabin table by lamplight. She didn't. She stitched a boy's thumb, and it was the boy's father who fainted into the coal scuttle.

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The Mercy carried one wireless, a stethoscope with a brass bell gone green at the rim, and a white cap she wore only on the wards, pinned flat, because she said a cap on a boat looked like a sail with nothing to catch. Every night she sat with the heart machine that ran off the engine's dynamo, a paper tongue feeding out of it while the pen scratched a line like a child trying very hard to draw a mountain. She coloured the peaks with a red crayon from her apron pocket, because the men in the bunks liked to see something bright.

On the ninth night a bargee called Tom Garrow came aboard grey as a lock gate and wouldn't lie down. Ada put the bell to his ribs and heard the river knocking at the hull, and under it a hitch in him, a beat that dropped out and came back late. She didn't frighten him. She had him count aloud with her, slow, the way you'd call a horse over a stile, and on the fourth count the trace on the paper steadied into a neat pink wave, as if it had been waiting for a man to tell it the time.

Tom lived to be an old man on the Oxford cut. Ada folded that strip of paper small and kept it inside her cap, and when she died the nurses at Ferrymead found it there, unfolded it on the table, and saw one pink line running the whole length of the river.