Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo on a forearm showing an eye inside a geometric outline above a marbled abstract figure and a small sphere.

Eye and geometric figure on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the inner forearm combines a fine outlined geometric frame with an eye set inside it. Below, a tall abstract figure with marbled, wood-grain style contour lines rises towards the eye, with a small sphere beneath it. Fine linework and stippled dotwork shading give depth, and the design is centred on the forearm against a plain pale background.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Forearm Eye Geometric shape Hexagon Sphere Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp had been dark for eleven minutes when Haddow climbed the last iron stair and found you on the bottom step, the logbook open across your knees and the pen dry in your hand. He did not ask why. He looked up through the gallery glass at the brass hexagon of panes, where the great lens sat like an eye half shut, and said the fog would lift by four if the gulls kept quiet.

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You had polished that lens every Tuesday for six years. You worked the prisms with a chamois until the pedestal beneath showed in their reflection, the old Portland stone carved into whorls and tide lines that wavered like wet timber when the lamp turned. Some nights you traced those grains with a fingertip and told yourself the light only turned because the stone was dreaming of a forest. Haddow called that nonsense. He also called the foghorn a hymn, so you did not take his opinions as final.

The brass sphere was the trouble. It had rolled from its bracket in the January gale and vanished, and Haddow swore he had nailed it down himself. You found it three weeks later in the scullery drain, dull with silt but whole, and carried it up the stair in your coat pocket, meaning to return it. Each night you meant to. Each night the clockwork needed winding first, and the stair was cold, and the sphere grew heavier against your hip.

At four the fog broke all at once, the way it does on this coast, and the beam swept the black water in a long white arm. You set the sphere on the sill beside the logbook and wrote, in the careful hand Haddow had taught you, that the light had been seen and the eye had opened again. Then you climbed down to make the tea and left the ball where the glass could keep it.