Traditional-style flash design of a grey weeping angel with its face in its hands beneath a peach banner reading DON'T BLINK, with blue tears.

Weeping angel with Don't Blink banner

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawing of a winged angel with its face hidden in its hands, set beneath a curved peach banner that reads DON'T BLINK. The wings and body are shaded in soft grey with black outlines and fine feather detail. Blue tear drops fall on either side, and small radiating lines sit below the figure on a plain white background.

Traditional Angel Wing Banner Lettering Tear Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Saint Agnes's remembered who carved the angel for the old chapel garden, only that it had been there before the wards were built around it. Mrs Pryce, who ran the night desk for thirty years, said it was the only statue in the county that kept its hands over its face on purpose. Her rule was simple. You looked at it when you did the round, and you kept looking until you had passed it, because the stone moved when nobody was watching and the stone did not like being forgotten.

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Young Tomasz came on for his first winter and laughed at her. He walked the corridor to the chapel with his torch, counting the drips and the sleeping names on the boards, and he did not look back at the garden once. When he came out again the angel's hands had come down an inch and its wings were folded differently, the feathers pale in the frost light. Tomasz went cold, and then he was angry, because he had been told a story and not a warning.

He went back on the Thursday with a pocket mirror and a flask of tea. He sat on the bench where the gravel met the lawn and watched the figure while the tea went lukewarm. His eyes stung. Somewhere past three the cold began to crack his lashes, and he thought of the ward upstairs where a man had been asking for his daughter, and he blinked, once, hard.

When the sky greyed he found the angel exactly as he had left it, face hidden, a little rain caught in the grooves of its fingers. Beneath the stone, where the frost was thin, someone had scratched a row of marks in the gravel with a finger: tally, tally, tally. Each mark was a night someone on the ward had looked away. He counted seven and then stopped counting.