Traditional style tattoo of a teal eye with red and yellow tear drops inside a book, surrounded by black star dots on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye in an open book with star dots

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A bold tattoo of a teal and white eye with a black pupil sits inside a tilted book, with red and yellow tear drops falling below it. A ring of black asterisk-shaped dots surrounds the book on a black background. The thick black outlines, flat colour fills and light shading on the book pages are typical of traditional tattooing, and the mixed palette of teal, red, yellow and black is set against pale skin.

Traditional Other Eye Book Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The book had come up the forest road in the carrier's cart, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with wet string, and Edda Crane did not like the smell of it. Pine resin, yes, but beneath that something like a cellar after rain. She set it on the bench beneath the window, where the light from the ash trees came through the glass in green bands, and slit the cord with her knife because the knots had swollen tight.

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Inside, every page was blank except the first. There, pressed into the paper as if someone had pushed a thumb through from the other side, was an eye. Its iris was the blue-green of pond weed under ice, and the pupil looked straight up at her. Beneath it hung three drops on the vellum, one red and two yellow, banded like the pieces of a sailor's rope. Edda told herself it was ink that had bled. She had seen ink bleed many times. This had not spread at the edges.

By morning the drops had moved. The red one had slid a finger's width toward the margin, leaving a thin wet track behind it. Around the border someone had stamped a ring of small black stars, and there were more of them now, crowding the gutter. Her grandson Piet came in with the bread and asked what she was reading. She turned the book toward him. He laughed, then stopped, because the eye had swung round to follow his hand.

That evening Edda carried the book past the last cottage to the oak where the carrier had found it, and set it down in the roots. She did not open it. She weighted the cover with a flat stone and walked home without looking back. When she came down the next morning the stone lay in the grass beside a book that was open, its first page bare, and the stars around its edge had all gone out.