Black and beige line drawing of an open eye with a detailed iris and short rays radiating outward, shown as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye with radiating rays design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised eye is drawn in solid black with a bold pupil, a ringed iris and a small highlight. Short tapered rays radiate from the outline on all sides, with a hand-engraved, woodcut-like texture. The design is in black ink on a flat beige background and is centred with generous space around it.

Eye Ray Sunburst Iris

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signal fire on Hollin Gate had not been lit since the thaw, and I was the only one left to notice. Old Pell had gone down to the valley with his mule and his cough, and the pass was mine to watch, which meant a stone hut, a brass spyglass with one cracked lens, and a wooden board nailed above the door where somebody long ago had painted a great open eye with rays streaming out from it like the sun coming over the ridge.

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Every dawn I climbed onto the flat rock and counted what came up the track. Carters, a priest in a green cloak, two boys chasing a goat that never once looked back at them. I wrote each name in the ledger in pencil, because ink froze in the well. The eye on the board never blinked. My mother used to say the painter meant it as a warning to bandits, that the pass saw everything, but I suspected he had simply been homesick for the sun and given it a pupil to look back with.

In the third week of November a rider came up in the dusk without a lantern. I could make out only his shape against the snow, so I did what the ledger told me and wrote down the hour. Then I lit the lamp, and its light caught the painted eye above the door, and for the first time I understood why the centre was so black and so round. It had been drawn to hold a single spark, the one small light a man might carry up a mountain in his hand.

He was no bandit. He was Pell's nephew, come to fetch me down before the storm. I gave him the ledger, the spyglass and the key, and at the bottom of the last page I wrote one more line before I left: Tuesday, a man came up the pass in the dark, and I was seen.