Open sketchbook with hand-drawn flash designs of eyes in green ink and skulls and eucalyptus sprigs in blue and orange, set on denim beside dried flowers.

Eye, skull and eucalyptus flash sketches

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

An open sketchbook shows two pages of hand-drawn tattoo-style flash designs. The left page has a grid of eyes in varying sizes, with lashes, hatched lids and irises in shades of green. The right page has skulls and eucalyptus sprigs with blue linework, orange gumnut-style blossoms and small orange dots, with a hand wearing turquoise rings at the lower left.

Botanical Eye Skull Leaf Blossom Sparkle Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ivy, the eucalyptus at the platform end has gone silver again since the heat broke, and Mr Okafor's dog has taken to sleeping under the timetable board, which is why I'm writing this on the back of the lost property form. The 6.40 came in forty minutes late with its windows full of dust, and a man got off carrying a sketchbook wrapped in a tea towel. He asked me whether anyone had been drawing the gumnuts on the bench by the water tank. I said that was my job, more or less, and he laughed and said the trees had been watching him since Broken Hill.

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He sat at the far end of the platform for two hours with his pencils and a jar of green ink. When the wind dropped I could see what he was making. Eyes, dozens of them, on little leaves and in the margins of the page, each one with lashes like the grass on the cutting. Then skulls tucked in among the blossoms, which I did not like at first, and then I did, because the blossoms were as orange as the lamp in the signal box and the skulls looked almost pleased to be there.

He left the sheet on the bench for me. I have it pinned above the kettle. The last thing he said, climbing back on the 4.15, was that a man who keeps his eyes open on a train line never misses the turn. I have decided he meant the sheet, and I am going to keep watching the line for him anyway.