Black and grey tattoo of an ornate mirror frame beside a lettered quote in blackletter style, on the side of a person's ribs.

Quote and ornate mirror on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an ornate, shadowed mirror frame with a figure-like shape at its base, alongside a line of blackletter-style text that runs in several lines across the skin. The linework is clean and bold, with soft grey shading inside the frame and a cast shadow beneath it. The image is a close side view of the torso with the tattoo filling most of the frame, and it is entirely in black and grey ink.

Lettering Ribs Mirror Quote Lettering Shadow Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on nights wanted the old mirror, so it ended up in the cupboard behind the sluice room, wrapped in a sheet that smelt of bleach. Mr Okafor from Ward Six had left it to the hospital in his will with a note asking that it hang where the staff could see it. Sister Dunne called it morbid. I said it was only morbid if you stared into it for long enough to forget your own shift.

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The frame was carved with vines gone black at the edges, and at its foot sat a little seated figure, one hand on its knee, as if it had been waiting for a bus since the Edwardians. Under the glass, somebody had tucked a card in the corner in careful capitals: IT DOES NOT DO TO DWELL ON DREAMS. I read it at half three one morning while the kettle went cold, and I thought of my sister in Hull, who I had been meaning to ring since Easter.

I began taking my break in front of the mirror. I told myself I was checking the bags under my eyes. Some nights I saw the ward behind me, the bed lamps and the drip stands, and some nights I saw a lit kitchen in a terraced house I had not lived in for twenty years. Both were reflections of the same corridor, and neither was any use to me.

At seven, when the day staff came up the stairs with their coats open and their flasks clinking, I carried the mirror out to the car park and leaned it against the bins. I took out my phone and rang Hull. She answered on the sixth ring, sounding half asleep and frightened, and I told her I had been an idiot, and the glass just showed me the sky going pale over the multistorey.