Traditional style tattoo of a nurse with a cap bearing a red cross and rolled curls, in grey shading with red accents, on a forearm.

Nurse portrait on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's profile with closed eyes and a cap marked with a red cross, shown in a head-and-shoulders style. The shading is grey and black with solid outlines, and the cap, hair curls and collar are rendered in soft greys. Red is used for the cross, cheek blush, lips and collar stripes against a plain skin background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the kettle's only just boiled, and mind the bottom step, it's been loose since the Coronation. Halloran came onto nights at St Agnes in the winter of forty-one, when the blackout was so thick you could walk into a lamp post and apologise to it. She pinned her hair in tight rolls every evening before she left the digs in Lambeth, then tucked it under the cap, because she said a woman who'd sat up with the dying all night had a right to look like she'd had her sleep.

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The night the Surrey Docks went up, the generator at St Agnes packed in at half past one. Every ward went black except the sluice room, where she had a paraffin lamp and a boy from the wharves with a shrapnel cut in his thigh. He was seventeen and kept asking whether the sirens were ours or theirs. So she shut her eyes and listened with him. The fire bells came in from the east, one, then two, then a long run of them. She told him which engine was which, the Poplar one with the cracked gong and the Bermondsey one that always sounded like a cough.

When the lights came back at four, she was sat on the sluice stool with her hands folded and the cap knocked crooked, the red cross catching the lamp. The boy was asleep. She took a tin of rouge from her apron pocket, dabbed her cheeks and her mouth in the dark glass of the window, and gave the reflection a long look. Nobody looks like a film star at four in the morning, she said when the porter came in. Drink your tea, Ted.

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