Traditional style forearm tattoo of an eye inside a grey cloud above an umbrella and red raindrops, with the words IS THAT TEARS OR IS IT RAIN.

Eye in a cloud with umbrella and raindrops

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A traditional style eye with a brown iris sits inside a black and grey cloud outlined in yellow, with a soft red glow behind it. Below, a grey umbrella with yellow trim is surrounded by red raindrops, and the lettering reads IS THAT TEARS OR IS IT RAIN. Bold black outlines and flat shading are shown on the forearm, with the design filling the frame from top to bottom.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had sprung a leak over the north ring, and Ada had been catching the drips in tin buckets since Tuesday. Nobody came to the Pemberton and Doyle Travelling Circus to watch the rain any more. So when Mr Doyle stood in the sawdust holding a black umbrella from a Leeds chemist over the sleeping tiger's cage, as though it were a bishop's canopy, she laughed until she had to sit down on a crate.

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The poster over the ticket booth was her grandfather's work. It showed the Watching Eye, the act that had once filled the tent on wet Saturdays: a painted iris the colour of strong tea, lashes like a row of tent pegs, set inside a grey cloud with a red halo behind it. Paint had flaked from the cloud over the years, and the lettering along the top had gone soft at the corners. Customers in the queue now squinted at it and asked her whether the stains running down from the eye were tears or only the rain getting in.

On the last Friday before the company moved on to Scarborough, Ada climbed the ladder with a tin of yellow and a brush worn to a stub. She repainted the cloud's outline first, then the trim on the umbrella, and finally the drops that hung beneath it like cherries. At the bottom she found a clean inch of board and began a new drop, slowly, so that it swelled and sagged before it fell.

'Is that tears, Ada?' Mr Doyle called up from the ring.

'No,' she said, and blew the paint dry. 'It's the weather.'

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