Bold black line drawing of an Eye of Horus design with a heavy brow and a curled marking below the eye, on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye of Horus line design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a stylised Eye of Horus drawn in solid black ink on a white background. The brow is a thick sweeping stroke, and the eye has a filled iris with a small highlight, outlined by tapering lines. A curled stroke at the outer edge and a long drop line below the eye give the design its traditional Egyptian form.

Eye of horus Eye Eyebrow Iris

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Ruan kept the cellar keys and I kept the ink, and between us we had kept the scriptorium of Saint Ebba's dry for eleven winters. That was the year the damp rose through the flagstones and the vellum began to blister. I was sent down with a lamp and a brush of squirrel hair to clean the old reliquary cupboard, and at the back, behind sacks of lime, I found a wooden box no longer than my forearm.

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Inside was a single sheet folded in four, painted on both sides in a brown gone the colour of weak tea. Someone had drawn an eye there: a heavy black brow sweeping out like a bird's wing, a pupil filled solid as a coal, and beneath it a long thin drop falling from the corner like rain that had stopped mid-fall. In the margin, in a hand I did not know, were the words: Keep the watch while the lamp burns. Sleep is the thief's hour.

I showed Abbot Clement, who smiled and said the eye was older than the house and older than the faith that now kept it. The old makers painted it on the prows of boats and over the doors of tombs, he said, so that nothing which looked out could ever be looked back at unseen. He held the sheet to the window, then gave it back. Copy it, he said. Then you will be the one who watches the lamp.

So I copied it, night after night, until my own eyes ached and the brow came out right at last. On the final night the damp had finally withdrawn and the lamp guttered for the first time in months. I lifted my brush and a single drop of ink hung from its tip, trembling above the page, then let go and ran down the paper in a long thin line. I laughed aloud in that empty cellar. It was the first time in all those winters I had felt watched and not afraid.