Black and grey tattoo on a lower leg showing an eye inside a triangle with an ornate frame, a beetle below, and fine geometric construction lines.

Eye and beetle within geometric lines on a calf

Geometric · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a realistic eye set inside a triangular ornate frame, with a beetle with spread wings beneath it. Fine geometric construction lines, dotted guide lines and the letters B, E and D surround the central motif. The design is rendered in black and grey with soft shading on the eye and beetle, photographed straight on against a dark background.

Geometric Realism Calf Eye Beetle Triangle Geometric line Frame Letter Compass Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has taken the good compass back to the cellarer again, so I am forced to draw these circles freehand, and the lines wander like a drunk man's road. Forgive the smudge. The abbot wants the Euclid finished before the feast of St Cuthbert, and I have reached the sixth proposition, where the letters must sit at the corners: B at the left, D at the right, and E crowning the whole thing like a bishop's mitre.

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This morning a beetle the size of my thumbnail walked across the vellum and stopped exactly where the dotted guide lines cross. Brother Ruel says it is an omen. I say it is a scarab that wandered in from the orchard with the windfall apples. I did not brush it off. I let it finish its rest, then I drew it in with its wings spread, because a thing that settles on the centre of a construction deserves to be kept.

The eye in the triangle is the difficulty. The prior insists the frame be ornamented, gilt where we can afford it, and that the eye look out from the centre of God's measure rather than at the reader. I have drawn it three times. Each time I shade the iris, the little point of light seems to find its own place. Last night I covered the page with a cloth and went to matins, and when I returned the iris had shifted a fraction toward the window.

I have decided to leave it looking where it looks. Send word whether the cloth still hangs on your sister's loom, and tell her the beetle is well, and that the lines are straight enough, which is more than I can say for the rest of us.