Black traditional tattoo of an eye with a chequered crown, leaves and a dagger on the upper arm, shown against a white brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye with geometric crown on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black eye sits beneath a chequered, crown-like band, with dotted lines and leaves curving below it. A dagger with a fish-shaped blade and a sprig of wheat sit lower down the arm. The design uses bold black outlines and solid fills on pale skin, with the arm cropped against a grey top and a white brick wall.

Traditional Blackwork Upper arm Eye Dagger Leaves Wheat Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Aldous to his sister Maud, in the week the river came over the causeway.

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Dear Maud, the abbot has finally let me into the granary, so you may stop fretting that I've forgotten how to count. Forty sacks of wheat came in on the barge before the water rose, and I have spent three days sorting the mouldy from the sound. The fish-bladed knife the cellarer uses for the eels hangs on a nail by the door. He says it is the only blade in the house that never asks questions.

Between the sacks there is a painted board, older than the chapel roof, showing an eye inside a chequered crown, the sort of crown a town might give a judge. Brother Hild says the painter had lost the sight of one eye and wanted the other to keep watch for both of them. I think he was simply fond of symmetry. Dots run along the lid like rain on a window, and the leaves beneath curl the way the reeds do when the wind turns.

Last night I sat with the eye while the bell rang for compline, and I could not look at it long without thinking of the eel-knife beside it, and the wheat, and how each of them is a thing cut down so the rest of us may eat. I said as much to the cellarer. He laughed and said the eye was only there to frighten the rats.

I have decided he is mostly right. Pray for the river to go down. Your loving brother, Aldous.