Black and grey line drawing of an eye pierced by an arrow, with a rose and leaves and a dripping tear beneath, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Arrow through an eye with a rose, Sagittarius design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen-and-ink drawing of an open eye with a vertical arrow passing through the iris, a rose and small leaves on the upper lid, and a dark drip falling from below the eye. Hatched lines and grey wash give the iris and tear depth, and the design is centred above the words Sagittarius and a short italic line of text.

Botanical Eye Arrow Rose Leaves Drip Tear Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The archer's bow hung above the mantel in the Halsey house for thirty years, and nobody in Wick Lane would touch it. Mabel Thorne dusted it on Sundays with a rag soaked in linseed oil, the way her mother had, and she never once looked at the string. She looked at the eye instead, the painted one on the lacquered belly of the wood, which someone had carved with an iris like a cartwheel and a pupil no bigger than a pea.

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It was the winter the Hollins boy went through the ice on the mere that Mabel first saw the drip. A thin black thread slid from under the painted lid and pooled on the shelf, and she wiped it up with her thumb before it could stain. By Candlemas there were three threads. By Lady Day the shelf had a crust of dark beads that smelled of wet earth and something sweeter underneath, like roses left too long in a vase.

Her brother Edwin laughed when she told him. He said the wood was only sweating, the way old timber does. But he came round the next morning with his collar turned up and asked whether she had ever wondered where the rose on the upper lid had come from, since no rose had been carved there when the bow was new. A single white bloom had opened at the edge of the wood overnight, with a bud beside it that was already leaning towards the window.

Mabel took the bow down that afternoon and carried it out to the orchard, where the ground was soft. She dug the hole herself. When she laid the wood in it, the dripping stopped, and in the spring the rose climbed the apple trunk, and the eye stayed closed, and the bloom that grew from it was the reddest thing in the parish.