Grey-shaded lotus flower with pale blue swirls and black Hebrew lettering across the top of a foot near the ankle.

Lotus and Hebrew script on a foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a foot showing a lotus flower on the ankle side, shaded in soft grey with pale blue-grey swirling lines curling beneath it. Black Hebrew script runs diagonally across the top of the foot towards the toes. The foot fills most of the frame against a blurred indoor floor.

Botanical Lettering Other Lotus Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the nurses' station says twenty to four, and the tube light over bay six has started its small tick again. You have been on your feet since ten. Mrs Okonedo in bed nine wants her blind lowered, then raised, then lowered again, and by the time you sit on the upturned bucket by the sluice your shoulders have forgotten they were ever meant to drop.

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Lev Abramsky in bay six is eighty-one and cannot sleep. His daughter left a card on the locker with the Hebrew printed in black above a line of English: Be still, and know. Dennis Hallam, the night porter, who has pushed trolleys along this corridor for thirty years, reads it aloud in a voice like gravel in a bucket. The old man has been muttering it since midnight, he says. "Thinks it's an instruction. Probably is."

At ten past four the saline pump starts to bleep and you go, hurrying the length of the corridor with the torch in your teeth. Nothing is wrong, only a kinked line. You straighten it, and the old man's hand lifts from the sheet and settles over yours, cool and papery. He says the words again, slower this time, as if you are the one who needs telling. You don't hurry out of the bay.

At dawn you walk out to the courtyard, where the pond is crowded with lily pads, and a single pale bloom has pushed up through the brown water as though nothing in the world were muddy. You copy the card's line in biro onto the back of a drug chart and fold it into the pocket of your cardigan. For once you let the day arrive without you.