Black ink eye surrounded by a radiating sunburst on the back of a hand, with dot pattern tattoos on the wrist, resting on an open book.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye and sunburst on the back of a hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on an open book, showing a black ink eye with a detailed iris and pupil, surrounded by a circular sunburst of rays and teardrop-shaped points. Smaller solid dots run down the wrist and across the fingers, creating a dotted pattern. The work is entirely black ink with fine shading and stippling, and the tattoo is centred on the back of the hand against the pale pages.

Dotwork Blackwork Hand Eye Sunburst Ray Dot Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the lock at Hythe has swallowed another of Father's lamps, and the ice is thick enough on the cut that Tobias walked the towpath to fetch the chandler. I am writing this at the cabin table with the lamp turned low, because the glass has come and I cannot stop looking at it.

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It is the lens for the old brass telescope, the one Mr Ashdown bought off the bankrupt observatory at Greenwich. Mother never let us touch it. Now it sits wrapped in sacking beside the stove, and the carter who brought it said a grinder in Oxford had sent the disc back twice because the centre would not sit true. When I unwrapped it, the light came through in a blur of rays, bright as a sunburst, and at the middle there was a clear dark spot like a pupil looking back up at me.

Last night I carried it on deck and held it against the moon over the water. The rays from the lamp on the far bank spread out in points like teardrops, and every ripple on the river gave back a small eye of its own. Tobias says I am fanciful. He may be right, but he also stood there with his cap in his hands until the bargemen started shouting for him to come and fend off the Ouse boat.

I have decided we will not sell it to the Greenwich man on Thursday. I will tell him the glass is cracked. Come up when the thaw comes, and we will set it on the roof and watch the river open its eye. Then you can tell me which of us has been seeing clearly.