Bold black blackwork tattoo of five symbols in a row on the inner forearm, including a crescent, a triangle, a circle with a flame motif and a circle with a knot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Row of five symbols on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a forearm with a row of five solid black symbols running across it. From left to right they are a crescent, a triangle with a line through it, a circle containing a flame-like shape, a diamond-shaped form, and a circle with an interlaced knot pattern. The ink is solid black with clean outlines and no shading, and the lighting is warm on a pale skin tone against a light surface.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Symbol Crescent Triangle Circle Knot Flame Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dora Wilkes had worked nights on the children's ward at St Aldric's for eleven winters, and she knew the building the way a farmer knows weather. The lifts sighed between floors. The radiators knocked in a rhythm nobody else heard. At the end of the east corridor was a door marked Store 9 with no key on the board, only five marks scratched into its paint in a row: a horn of moon, a split triangle, a ring with a flame inside it, a diamond with its corners cut, and a knot that went round and never ended.

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Her gran had told her the marks were older than the hospital, older than the road that led to it. They were for a night when the ward grew too full and the dark too thick, her gran said, and whoever read the marks in order at that door would be let through to wherever the sick child lay. Dora thought it was the kind of thing old women said to keep girls in bed. Then one February night a boy called Tomasz stopped breathing at three in the morning, the monitor shrieking, and the store was the only place she had not yet searched for the missing trolley.

She went to the door. She touched the moon, then the triangle, then the flame, and her hand stayed steady until it reached the diamond. The paint there was warm. She said the names under her breath as her gran had taught her, and the knot was cool against her palm. The door opened onto a room with no ceiling, only a sky the colour of ash, and a single bed where the boy lay with his eyes open, watching her as if she were late.

She did not remember the next hour well. She remembered her own voice counting compressions, and a sound like a kettle coming to the boil, and then the monitor was beeping slow and ordinary again. When she came back out, the door was just a cupboard. Tomasz was asleep. The trolley stood in the sluice room where it had always been. Only her palm stayed warm, and she kept her hand in her pocket for the rest of the shift.