Black and grey traditional tattoo of an eye inside a scalloped cloud with raindrops beneath it, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye and cloud with raindrops on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single open eye with a highlight sits at the centre of a scalloped cloud shape, with a row of teardrop raindrops falling below. Bold black outlines are combined with dotwork stippling and solid black fills in the cloud, and the drops have white highlights. The design is shown in black and grey ink on a forearm, against a dark background.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Eye Cloud Raindrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Quintus, the cloud sat on the ridge again at the ninth hour, the same grey fleece it wore all last month, and it hung over our terraces without letting a single drop fall. Father would have spat on the stones. I went up with the measuring cord, as you asked, and counted the seed-pits. Forty-one of them are dry as potsherds, and the barley in the lower field has gone the colour of old bread.

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You remember the eye the women painted above the granary door when we were boys, the one inside the cloud with a bright dot in its pupil. Nobody here will say whose eye it is. Demetrios the potter swears it belongs to the storm-god, who is owed a share of every harvest, and Hesna swears it belongs to the baker, who has never once cheated the scales. I think it only means that someone is always watching the sky and keeping count, which is more than the magistrate does.

Yesterday, at dusk, the rain finally came. It fell in fat, separate drops, each one heavy enough to leave a dark mark in the dust, and it fell on the burial field beyond the wall and nowhere else. I stood under the olive tree with the cord still wound around my wrist and watched the drops strike the new graves while the barley stayed bone dry. Then the cloud drew its grey lid back and the eye looked down at me, and I understood that I had been counting the wrong thing.

I have not told Mother. Tomorrow I will walk out to the far pits and see whether the water has soaked through to the roots. Write to me, if the post-runner still crosses the pass, and tell me whether the eye waters in Ostia too.