Black ink flash drawing of an eye within a planchette shape, a woman in an Art Nouveau style frame, and a death's head moth below, with no body placement shown.

Eye, planchette and death's head moth design

Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing shows a planchette-shaped frame containing an open eye inside a circle, with ornate scrolling foliage around it. A woman with short dark hair stands within the frame, holding its upper edges, and a death's head hawkmoth with a skull on its thorax sits at the bottom. The linework is fine and dense, with stippled shading and no colour, and the composition is symmetrical and vertical.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Hester, the snow shut the Scarth pass on Tuesday and the carrier has not come up since, so this letter will wait for the thaw the way I have waited for my supper. We are nine at the inn now. Mr Quill, the surveyor, plays patience in the scullery with the innkeeper's boy, and the German lady who paints finches has not come down since the avalanche bell rang.

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Last night Mrs Ashdown brought the old planchette out of the parlour cupboard, a heart-shaped board of pale wood on three brass feet, and asked for volunteers. I sat because the stove was warm and I was bored, not because I believe in such things. The pencil moved at once. It drew a wing in long soft strokes, then a second, then a little skull that made Mr Quill laugh until the board wrote his late wife's name in a hand none of us could have forged. He went very quiet after that.

The board then traced a circle and, inside the circle, an open eye, and it kept returning to the same spot at the top of the page as if pressing a seal. Mrs Ashdown said the eye was the pass itself, always watching who crosses. I said that was nonsense, and the pencil wrote NO, quite clearly, and we all agreed it was time for bed.

I went to the window before I undressed. Far up the ridge a single lantern was moving slowly along the snow towards us, though nobody has been able to leave the valley for days. I have put the pencil in my pocket and I am writing this by its light. Do not worry. Whoever it is, I think they are only counting the beds.

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