Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a woman in an eyed headdress with snakes, birds and flowers, above a banner reading Volverte a ver.

Eyed headdress woman with banner design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman with a downcast gaze wears a tall headdress of eyes, arrows and drips, with snakes curling around her shoulders. Below her, a small bird, a creature and flowers sit within a shaded oval, and a banner reads Volverte a ver. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatched shading in grey tones on pale paper.

Woman Eye Headdress Snake Bird Flower Banner Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the top of the Pass of Ravel, where the road gave up and became goat track, the customs hut had a gate hung with brass eyes. Nobody remembered who first nailed them there. The old men said each one was for a traveller who went over the mountain and did not come back, and that the eyes watched the road so the guard would not have to.

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The guard was a woman called Ines Morell, who kept a finch in a wicker cage on the sill. One winter a man came up from the valley with a cart of wine casks and a coat that smelled of lowland smoke. He said he was carrying nothing but wine. Ines asked him to open the casks anyway. Under the wine lay letters tied in oilcloth, one for every family on the far side who had someone waiting on the other. She turned them over one by one until she found a name she knew, her brother Tomas, lost in the snow ten years before. The letter inside was short and only said volverte a ver.

She let the man go down with his wine and kept the letter. That night the finch sang for the first time since autumn, and the brass eyes on the gate caught the lamp so that the whole road seemed to be looking at her. In spring a small bird landed on the gatepost with a scrap of blue ribbon in its beak. Ines took the ribbon, bent a new brass eye from a spoon, and nailed it up beside the others, facing down the valley.