Colour tattoo on the forearm of an eye inside a triangle with sunburst rays, above a mountain landscape, birds and a red flower.

Eye in triangle with mountains and flower

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo on the forearm shows an open eye with a green iris inside a triangle, surrounded by black radiating lines and an orange and yellow wash. Below, a framed panel holds a teal and grey mountain range, a few birds in flight and a red flower with loose, sketchy black outlines. The linework is bold and broken in places, with soft watercolour-style colour fills and splashes that give the piece a painterly look.

Forearm Eye Triangle Sunburst Mountain Bird Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame had been nailed shut for eleven winters, and nobody in Vell would say why. Ottilie Brand mixed her paints on the windowsill of the abbey's north room, where the light came in grey off the snow, and she worked the mountains first because they were the easy part. Her father had been the abbey painter until his hands began to shake, and she had inherited his brushes, his jars of teal and cinnabar, and his habit of talking to the walls.

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The commission came from Brother Anselm, who wanted the peaks above the valley painted onto the refectory wall, with a sunburst of orange above them and an eye at the apex. 'So the valley knows it is watched,' he said, and he would not explain further. She painted the iris the colour of the lake below the pass. When she asked about the red flower low in the frame, he said it was for the carters who had gone over the scree road and never come back, and that they had kept better watch than any eye.

On the last evening she sat alone with a single brush and a jar of water. The orange wash ran where she had been too quick, and she left it running. Outside, a flock of crows lifted off the roof in one black scatter, and she sketched them in pencil, lines so loose they seemed ready to leave the page.

In May she took her father's spyglass up the old scree path and found the stone frame the abbot had described, its edges dark with rain. Through it the peaks stood exactly as she had painted them. Low down, a red flower grew from a crack in the rock, and beside it a figure in a faded coat lifted a cloth and waved. Ottilie waved back, and for the first time since the snow, the eye on the wall felt like it had something to look at.