Black and grey fine line tattoo of a woman in a dotted coat holding a cigarette, with smoke dots rising beside her, on the inner arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with a cigarette in a textured coat

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with a straight, side-parted bob looks to the side while holding a cigarette up near her shoulder. She wears a coat with a dotted and dashed texture, and small dots drift upward from the cigarette. The linework is clean and even, and the coat texture is built from short strokes and stippling, with no colour.

Fine line Dotwork Other Woman Portrait Cigarette Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on nights at St Aldric's is allowed to smoke inside, so Wendy Pask took her breaks on the loading bay with her back against the bin store and her coat buttoned to the collar. I was twenty-three and newly on the wards, and I learned that the only reliable clock in the building was the ash on her cigarette, which dropped at the same pace whatever the ward was doing.

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She had a rule about the coat. It was the grey tweed she'd bought from a charity shop in Harrogate the winter her husband left, and she said it had taken on the weather of every night she'd worn it. When the bay doors rattled she'd tilt her chin and say that's Bed Four wanting the commode, love, and she'd be right every time, because she had listened to the building the way other people listened to the radio.

One night in February the monitors on Ward Six went silent for ten minutes at once, a power blip that rebooted in a rush of beeps. Wendy didn't move. She blew smoke up at the sodium lamp and watched it climb into the cold, breaking apart into small grey specks that hung and drifted. Then she tapped her ash and said there, that's the lights back on, you'll hear the phones in a minute.

I went back up the stairs with the phones already ringing behind me. When I looked down from the landing she was still out there, one hand raised, letting the last of the smoke go up past the roofline like something she had decided to stop holding onto.