Black line flash design of an eye within a cloud, with two crossed straight razors above and red rays and raindrops below, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye in a cloud with crossed razors

Mixed · Flash

The design shows a stylised open eye sitting inside a cloud outline, with two straight razors crossed above it. Fine black linework builds up shading on the cloud and razor handles through hatching and stippling. Red rays and three raindrops below the cloud add the only colour against a plain white background.

Eye Cloud Raindrop Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the sawdust, and keep your hands out of the lamp, it's the last of the paraffin. You want the one about the Eye? Every show in England had a weather man once, and ours was Ambrose Quill, who kept two straight razors crossed on the wagon door and a painted eye sitting on a cloud above the big top.

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By the time the Pendleton Brothers' ring rusted in a Lancashire field, there were only eleven of us left, and the crowds had gone to the picture houses in town. Ambrose still shaved every morning, slow, with his face turned up to the sky, because he said the cloud had to see him doing it properly. The razors had belonged to his father, who once shaved a visiting duke in a field tent and was paid in gold and a bad cold. Ambrose said a man could read the weather off the lather if he kept his strokes even.

The last show was a Tuesday. Three people came, a farmer, a boy with a bicycle, and a woman who never gave her name. Halfway through the high wire the sky went the colour of a fox, red rays spilling under the cloud, and Ambrose stopped the band with one raised finger. Three drops fell, each one a long way apart, and he counted them out loud for the empty seats.

Then he folded the razors, crossed them on his palm, and walked out into the rain to finish his shave. We found the eye on the canvas the next morning, still open, and nobody has ever had the heart to paint it shut.