Black script lettering of Psalm 23:4 across the side of a person's ribs, with the face not shown.

Psalm 23:4 script on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a black script tattoo of Psalm 23:4 set in five lines across the side of the ribs, with the page reading from 'Though I walk through' to 'Psalm 23:4'. The lettering is dark, fine and evenly spaced, with the reference set smaller beneath the verse. The skin is a warm tone against a teal wall, and the subject wears a black top and a light patterned garment, with the head cropped out of frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ward is quiet at three, apart from the lift that grinds between floors and the drip alarm on bed nine that you silence with two fingers before it can wake anyone. Mr Okonedo's daughter pinned a laminated card to his locker before she left. You have read it four times already, because the typeface is so careful, as if whoever chose it expected someone to stop and look properly. You know the words from your gran's kitchen in Wigan, though you haven't said them aloud since you were a girl.

Keep reading

At half past three he wakes and asks you to read it to him. You pull the card off the locker and do, and your voice comes out steadier than you expect. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. He tells you his wife used to sing the second line to the wrong tune on purpose, just to annoy the organist, and you laugh, and then you check his line and adjust the rate so the morphine doesn't outrun the pain. He doesn't ask you what you believe. He only wants the rest of it.

By five the monitor has settled into its slow green rhythm. You sit on the plastic chair with the card on your knee and look at the small reference at the bottom, Psalm 23:4, set apart and neat, like a note left on a fridge for someone who will need to find it. It occurs to you that the daughter didn't print this for her father. She printed it for whoever would be walking these corridors alone at night.

You slide the card back into the locker, exactly where you found it, and go to see who needs you next.

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