Two palms turned up showing a small black fine line arrow with feathered fletching, a single eye, and the words THE DEVIL WON'T KEEP TIL MORNING in black lettering.

Arrow, eye and quote on palms

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two open palms show black ink tattoos: a thin arrow with a feathered fletching on the left palm, a small eye on the right palm, and a hand-lettered quote in capitals beneath it. The linework is fine and even, with the lettering set in simple block capitals. The image is in warm tones against a wooden table, with a watch on the left wrist and the palms angled toward the camera.

Fine line Lettering Hand Arrow Feather Eye Quote Lettering Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the lamp is nearly out and the sentry on the bridge has ears like a fox. The arrow came first. Old Corran Vey shot it from the north bank the night the river froze, a bowshot over the black water, and its feathers were still shivering when it stuck in the post beside the customs hut. Tied to the shaft was a strip of linen with three letters scratched on it, E, V and G, and nobody on either side could read them as anything but a debt.

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The eye was the trouble. Every crossing has a clerk who watches more than he stamps, and this one was called Sosimo, who kept a glass eye in a tin box and set it on the sill each dusk so the smugglers would think someone was always looking. He read the linen by lantern and laughed, then stopped laughing, because E, V and G were the initials of three men who had gone through the ice in the spring, and the arrow had come from the one man who hadn't.

So he went out to the bridge at midnight with his coat buttoned to the chin and the old ferrywoman's saying in his mouth: when a bargain tastes sour, the devil won't keep 'til morning. He found Corran sitting on the rail, cold as a fencepost, waiting to be arrested. They talked until the frost crept up the stones and the sentry pretended to sleep. Neither of them ever said what was owed or to whom.

By dawn the arrow was gone from the post and the linen was gone with it. The tin box stayed on the sill for thirty years, its glass eye turned toward the river, watching for a debt that had already been paid.