Black line drawing of two detailed eyes with lashes and brows, with Russian lettering between them, on a cream background, shown as a tattoo design.

Pair of eyes with Russian lettering

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows two open eyes with heavy brows and long lashes, one on each side of a centred block of bold Russian capital lettering in three lines. The eyes are shaded with fine hatching and dotted irises, and the text is solid black. The design is set on a plain cream background with a faint, washed-out figure visible behind it.

Eye Eyelashes Eyebrow Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, the kettle's only just gone on and the ward won't stir before three. You want to know why I keep that card propped against the sharps bin? Galina cut it from her grandmother's old schoolbook, the one with cream pages gone soft as cloth. Two eyes, lashes like a comb, and under them the words Гляжу на жизнь так какая она есть. I look at life the way it is. She said it was the only sensible thing ever printed in a book meant for children.

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For thirty-one years I worked nights on that corridor, and I was no good at it at first. I wanted the clock to move faster, the patients to sleep, the doors to stay quiet. Every shift I was looking at the life I'd have preferred, not the one in front of me. When I came home grey at six in the morning, Galina would tap the card with one finger and say nothing at all. That was her lesson, a finger on the paper.

Then came the night with Mr Halloran in bay four, who asked me straight out whether dying hurt. I could have said no, or told him about the garden he'd see. Instead I pulled the chair close and told him what I knew, which was that it was hard, that the tea would be warm, and that I would stay. He didn't ask again. Nobody did anything grand that night. I just stopped looking at the clock.

So now you know. Look at it as it is, love, even the bits that make your hands shake. Pass me that card, would you? The kettle's boiled and I've a long corridor still to walk.