Traditional style tattoo of a diamond kite with an eye at its centre and a trailing string of red and black bows on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye kite with bow ribbon on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A diamond-shaped kite containing a single open eye sits above a trailing line of small bow shapes that curl down the forearm. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with red, yellow and orange fills and grey shading inside the kite. Other tattoos in teal and red appear at the top of the frame against a white background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kite was Dev's idea, though he never got to fly it properly. Thirty-one floors up on Corran Heights, the wind came off the reservoir like it had a grudge, and every Sunday we took the stairwell with our pockets full of bin-bag plastic and garden wire from the caretaker's shed. Dev drew the eye himself. He said a kite needed something watching over the estate, so the flats would know who was out.

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We taped the bows onto the tail, one every arm's length, cut from his nan's old satin ribbon in red and mustard. Each bow took an evening. Mrs Okafor from flat 1204 said we'd bring the lift down with our nonsense, and Dev told her the kite was for her, so she could see the sky without going out on the balcony. She laughed, which was rare, and gave us a tin of shortbread for the road.

The afternoon it finally went up, it climbed so fast the string burned through my palms. The bows streamed out behind it like a line of small birds, and for a minute the whole block seemed to lean over its railings to look. Then the line snapped at the knot Dev had tied in a hurry.

We found it three days later snagged on the aerial of the block opposite, the eye still open, bows lifting at the top of the sky. Dev went up every night after that to check on it, and I stopped asking him why. Some things you let stay where they land.

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