Traditional style tattoo on a forearm showing a red and white eye within rays and clouds, above a woman's face in a headpiece and a red rose.

Eye, rays and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm tattoo with an open eye at the centre, outlined in black and filled with red, surrounded by white clouds, black and red rays and dotted lines. Below, a woman's face in a headpiece with yellow accents is shown in black, grey and skin tones, with a large red rose and green leaves at the bottom edge. The bold black outlines and solid colour fills are typical of traditional American tattooing, and the subjects are set against a plain orange background.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Eye Cloud Ray Woman Headpiece Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maren had been awake for nineteen hours when the sensor on the Salt Exchange roof began to blink red, and she climbed the ladder with her thermos wedged under one arm because nobody else on the night shift would go up in that wind.

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The rig was older than the district. A brass-rimmed dome sat on the roof, and the engineers called it the Eye because a painter long dead had given it a lid like one. Its lens looked up through the cloud deck, and the black rays scored across its housing were the seeding vanes that fanned out when the thing woke. Below, the city of Harrow Dock waited for rain that the forecasts had promised for six seasons running. The cisterns were dry, and the buckets lined the stairwells like sleeping dogs.

She found the fault in the lower gear, a single tooth snapped clean through. The clouds were piling white and fat above the lens, swelling like bread, and every minute they sat there unseeded was a minute lost. Her hands were stiff with cold. She had a spare tooth in her coat pocket, cut from a lathe no one had used since her grandmother's time, and she fitted it by feel while the wind tugged at her hood.

When she turned the crank, the vanes unfolded one by one with a sound like someone shaking out a sheet. The first drops struck the dome and ran down its painted rays. Maren stayed on the ladder with her gloves soaking through and watched the rain fall over the rooftops in a single grey curtain, the old rose on the cistern gate darkening under it, the whole city below beginning to open its buckets.