Black and grey engraving-style tattoo of an open hand with an all-seeing eye in a triangle, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open hand and all-seeing eye on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a black and grey tattoo of an open palm drawn with fine hatched linework, resembling an engraving. To the right, a triangle framing an eye is shaded with dense dotted borders and sits against a background of finer patterned lines. The skin is pale against a warm yellow-orange wall, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Hand Eye Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite,

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Third night on the children's ward and the lift at the north end has finally been fixed, which means I no longer climb the stairs with a trolley of linen and a grudge. Mrs Okafor's grandson came in at two with a fever the registrar kept calling viral and the nurses kept calling nothing, and I sat with his mother in the family room because somebody had to hold the tea. She kept opening her hand on her knee, palm up, the way you'd offer a biscuit to a horse. Nobody was taking anything from it. I think she was only checking it was still there.

Brenda Lusk, our Night Sister, who has run this floor since the carpets were green, says there is a hand carved into the lintel of the old chapel, and above it an eye in a triangle that the porters swear was painted over in 1987. Brenda says the hand is for giving and the eye is for keeping count of what you've given. I told her that sounded like a bookkeeper's idea of prayer. She told me to mind my manners and check the oxygen in bay four.

At half past four the boy's temperature broke. I didn't see it happen. I only saw his mother's hand go flat against her own chest and stay there, like a lid closing. Brenda caught my eye across the corridor and nodded once, the way she does when a chart finally adds up.

I'm writing this on the back of a laundry docket because my notebook is in my locker and I wanted it down before the sun comes up. Some nights the whole building feels like a hand held out, and some nights the eye in the triangle is the only thing that seems to be awake. Tonight I'd say it was both.