Black and grey tattoo of a textured creature with eye-like details on the back of a hand, with a fern-like tattoo continuing up the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey textured creature tattoo on the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a textured, organic form with eye-like shapes covers the back of a hand. The shading is built from tonal greys and dark accents that give the surface a raised, rippled look. A second, darker tattoo with feathery or fern-like linework runs up the forearm, and the photo is taken against a dark top and a blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your Majesty, I write from the fen road at Hollin Ford, where the reeds have grown taller than the carts and the ferns have pushed up through the causeway stones. The toll-keeper's boy brought me the creature in a sack last Tuesday, still wet, and I have not slept well since.

Keep reading

It is no toad, though it has a toad's patience. Its back is heaped like wet bark or a fallen cushion of moss, and across it open a dozen eyes, small and round as river pebbles, each one lidded and watching. When I set it on the flagstone it did not run. It rippled, the whole mound lifting and settling like a breathing sea, and every eye turned toward the lamp. The boy says it ate the ferns at the mouth of the sluice and then sat very still for three days, as if counting.

I have measured the marks it leaves on the mud. They climb the bank in a pattern like bracken fronds, one feathered line after another, and they lead, I am certain, toward the drowned chapel where the Harrowmere wardens buried their charts. I have not told the Guild. I would rather you judged the matter than the men who sold the sluice rights.

I enclose a sketch. Forgive the smudges; my thumb kept finding the ink. Shall I bring it to the palace, or shall I leave it where it sits, under a wet cloth, with the lamp kept lit?

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