Traditional-style tattoo of an ornate dagger with a dotted oval frame and an eye with red shading, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and eye on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dark-outlined dagger with an ornate hilt runs down the forearm, with a beaded oval frame containing an eye and a red shaded area. The linework is bold and solid, with flat colour fills and some grey shading on the blade. Red, yellow and black ink dominate the design, and a partly visible orange flower tattoo sits at the top edge of the frame against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mother, the Lord Warden has finally let me take the dagger out of the vault, though he made me wear gloves and count every bead on its hilt before I was allowed to touch it. You'll remember the old saying in Corrin that a blade with a painted eye cannot be lied to. I thought it nonsense until Tuesday, when the Queen's cousin swore before the whole council that he had never seen the Bellweather letters, and the dagger, laid on the table between them, seemed to turn its eye toward him, though the lamp was behind it and nobody had moved it.

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Afterwards the Warden told me the eye was only enamel and the red beneath it was cheap madder, not the blood of anyone's oath. He is a practical man and I believe him. Still, I went back down to the vault that night with a candle and looked for a long while at the pale iris and the little gilt beads around it, like a rosary someone had given up on halfway, and I felt watched in a way I cannot describe to the other clerks.

The cousin was sent north on the third day. Nobody has told me what he confessed, and I have stopped asking. What I do know is that the Warden has had the hilt polished until the gilt is nearly gone, and that he now carries the candle down himself.

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