Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hand with crossed fingers and an eye in the palm, framed by a leafy wreath, on the chest.

Hand with eye and leaf wreath on chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with the fingers crossed is outlined in fine dark ink, with an open eye drawn in the centre of the palm. The eye and the shading of the hand are built from stippled dots, while the outline and the vine of small leaves curving beneath the hand are in solid line. The ink is black and grey on warm skin, and the design sits centrally on the chest.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Hand Eye Leaves Wreath Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Night shift on Ward Nine always began with the lift sticking between floors, and I had learned to count to forty before anyone panicked. By one in the morning the corridor smelled of antiseptic and reheated tea, and the only light came from the nurses' station and the blue glow of the drinks machine. Bay four had one bed by the window, and that was where Mr Pell lay, awake, with his right hand folded on the blanket.

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He was eighty-one and had sold lamp oil on the market in Hereford for fifty years. He told me his mother had pricked the hand into him with a sharpened pin and soot when he was a boy, and that the eye in the palm was there to watch what the fingers could not. 'Crossed fingers are for hoping,' he said. 'The eye is for knowing where the trouble is coming from.' I said I would take the hoping and leave him the knowing.

At four the monitor over bed seven began to chime, and I ran. When I came back past bay four, his hand had slipped out from under the sheet, and the two fingers were still crossed. I stood there longer than I should have, looking at that small dark eye, and then I crossed my own fingers behind my back the way I had at nine years old, and went to bed seven.

He was gone by the morning handover, quietly, with the window open an inch for the milk-cart air. His daughter came for the locker and found a sprig of bay folded inside a paper napkin on the bedside table. She asked if I had left it there. I said he must have kept it from the Christmas pudding, and she laughed, and I did not tell her about the hand.