Black and grey dotwork and geometric mandala with a triangle eye on a forearm, with a bold lettering tattoo reading I will stand my ground on the forearm below.

Eye mandala forearm and lettering on wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of two forearms. The upper arm carries a detailed dotwork and geometric mandala with radiating rays, a lotus-like pattern and an eye inside a triangle, with swirling linework extending up the arm. The lower forearm shows bold block lettering reading I will stand my ground, angled along the arm, with a small drawn object near the wrist.

Dotwork Geometric Lettering Forearm Eye Triangle Mandala Sunburst Lotus Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow came early that year, and the ewes would not come down off the top pasture. Ruth Haldane stood in the gap of the wall with the lantern hooked on a crook of ash, her boots sunk to the ankle, and told her son to go in by the fire where it was warm. He did not go. He stood beside her with his hands in his sleeves and his jaw set the way his father's had been set before the fever took him.

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Above the gatepost, on the grey stone that had been there longer than the house, a carver had cut an eye inside a triangle and set rays around it like the spokes of a wheel. Her grandmother had called it the watching stone. Every spring someone climbed up with a pot of lime and painted the rays white again, so that the eye could be seen from the road. Nobody in the valley had ever asked what it was watching for.

The wind came down the fell in the dark, and with it a shape that moved wrong, low and wide, a thing with no face that stopped at the wall and did not climb it. Ruth's grandmother had a saying for such nights, and she said it aloud now, because a voice in the cold is a kind of fence. Stand your ground and the ground will stand with you. Her son repeated it under his breath. The shape stayed where it was until the lantern guttered and went out.

They saw the first light come up the valley like someone lifting a sheet. The rays on the stone caught it first, bright and clean, and the snow on the top pasture was thin and blue and stopping at the wall. The ewes came down single file through the gap, one after another, brushing past Ruth's hand, and not one of them was lost.