Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an eye inside a triangle with radiating lines, on the palm of a hand.

All-seeing eye in a triangle on a palm

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large triangle with a stylised eye at its centre sits within a circle of fine radiating lines, with smaller dots marking the corners. The linework is bold and the triangle is filled with solid black shading, while the surrounding geometry uses stippled dotwork. The palm is shown from the front, filling most of the frame against a dark background.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Hand Eye Triangle Circle Geometric shape Sunburst Palm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass theodolite has been wrapped in a wool sock since Tuesday, and you have not stopped checking it. Up here the pass is a raw cut between two shoulders of grey rock, and the wind comes through it like something with a grudge. Hendry, the chainman, has his thumb on the rope and is swearing at the sun.

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You set the instrument over the pillar at the eastern cairn and level the bubble until it sits dead centre. Through the eyepiece the far peak swims, then steadies. Three stations make a triangle, and every corner has to be true or the whole map drifts. Hendry drives the iron bolt into the rock and you mark the stone with rust-brown paint, one dot, then two, then three, the way the old Ordnance men taught you. The sun ring around the summit looks like a halo someone scratched in with a nail.

By afternoon the cloud lifts off the valley and the figures in your field book agree with each other for the first time in a week. You sit on the wet cairn and read the angles back twice. Sums that close are rarer than people think. The last surveyor to work this pass left a bearing cut into the lintel of the shepherd's hut, and it was out by a hair, and you spent two nights deciding whether to correct it.

In the end you leave it alone. That hair of error is the only honest thing on the whole mountain, and you would rather keep it than pretend. You pack the theodolite, tip your cap to the empty valley, and write the date beneath the triangle in your book, where the one true figure sits in the middle of everything else.