Eye and totem design in gold line
Fine line · Colour · Flash
A symmetrical design of an eye with a sunburst at its centre, with rays fanning out above it. Below, a vertical totem of arrow shapes, a diamond with a sun motif, beaded chains and dangling teardrop tassels descends to a caption reading The Kind Totem. The thin gold linework is set on a dark background, with the colour appearing as metallic foil.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The cook on the Hollin Grace kept a wooden board nailed above her stove. A painted eye sat at the top, with a sunburst of thin rays fanning out around it, and a long tail of arrows, beads and little tassels hung below. Nobody aboard knew who had carved it. The cook said her grandmother had made it in a village now lost under the Humber silt, and that the eye was there so the sea would know someone was looking back.
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One February the ship lay becalmed off Spurn with no wind at all. Tobias Lamb, the youngest hand, burned with fever in the forward bunk. The mate wanted broth from the last of the hens, and the cook refused, because the hens were the only eggs the ship had. They argued over the stove until the fire went out. Then, in the dark, she lit a single lamp and held it up to the board, and the gold on the eye caught the flame and threw it outward along every ray.
Tobias was sitting up by morning, asking for bread. The wind had come at four bells from the west, soft and steady, enough to fill the sails. The mate said it was a strange thing to get a kind wind in February, and the cook agreed that it was.
After that she took one bead from the chain each week and dropped it into the scrap bucket for the gulls. The hens stayed alive, and so did the boy.
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