Black ink flash design of an eye inside a triangle, with feathers, a crescent mandala and lettering, drawn in blackwork and geometric style.

Eye in triangle with feathers and lettering

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design centred on an eye set inside a triangle, with a feather above and a feather below a lower mandala of crescent moon, chevrons and triangles. Lettering reading LOVERS UNITE runs across the middle of the composition. The linework uses dense hatching, dotwork and solid black fills on a plain white background, with no colour.

Blackwork Geometric Dotwork Eye Triangle Feather Mandala Crescent moon Lettering Chevron

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad kept the race clock on a nail above the loft door, a grey plastic box with one round face that he polished every Sunday with an old stocking. Every bird that came home had to be stamped in by it, and he said the clock could see further than any man on the moor. We lived at the top of Keighley, where the road gives up and the sheep take over, and our birds flew in from Skipton and Ripon and once, impossibly, from past Carlisle.

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The summer I turned fourteen, a blue cock called Lovers Unite came in three days late from a Lancaster training run, feathers ragged and one ring rubbed raw. Dad would not let me touch the clock. He sat on an upturned crate with the stamp tin open on his knee and the race card spread flat beside him, printed with its moon and its rows of little triangles, and he waited. He said a bird that is late has only been looking at something worth looking at.

We waited until the light went thin and the sheep bells started up down the valley. The cock came through the gap in the slates with a sound like someone clapping once. Dad pressed the ring to the reader and the small screen blinked a time that was nobody's fault, only the wind's. He laughed for the first time in a month, rubbed the bird's breast with his thumb until it settled, and handed it to me to hold.

Later I found the card pinned in the kitchen. Beside the printed eye someone had drawn a second, smaller one in biro, looking back at the first.