Black and grey traditional-style tattoo of an eye with roses on the back of a hand, with lettering on the fingers and a further tattoo partly visible on the forearm.

Eye and rose tattoo on the hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with a black and grey tattoo of an open eye surrounded by roses across the back of the hand. Smooth shading and bold outlines define the eye and petals, and smaller letters are inked across the fingers. The hand rests near a brown leather boot and dark denim, with a key and a partly visible tattoo on the forearm at the top left of the frame.

Traditional Hand Forearm Eye Rose Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sensors on the Crane Street gate woke at ten past three, which meant somebody had tried the old lock with a stolen card again. I had the brass key in my fist before I was properly awake, its teeth biting into my palm the way they always did. Ottilie had cut it for me the year the towers went dark, from a blank she'd smelted out of a dead tram's bell. She said a key you could feel was worth more than any code.

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Down at the gate, rain ran off the puddles and into the drains that still sang when the tide came in. The intruder was a boy, fourteen at most, with a rolled blanket and a patched coat that had once been a bakery sign. Letters were scratched across his knuckles, the way the scavenger gangs marked their dead. I knew that trick. I'd done it myself, one name per finger, until Ottilie made me stop.

I didn't lift the gate. I asked him what name he was carrying. He held up his hand and spelled it out slowly, the ink catching the lamp: O, T, I. It was her name, or the start of one he'd been told to find. The eye painted above the roses on the gate panel caught the light too, a camera the council had forgotten to switch off, and I understood the boy had come to be seen, not to steal.

I turned the key and the gate swung wide. 'She keeps the bell in the back room,' I said. 'Mind the third step, it's a liar.' He went past me into the light, and the eye on the wall closed slowly, as if it had finally been told it could rest.