Black dotwork and blackwork tattoo on an upper arm showing a hand with a heart inside a triangle, an eye below, and a sun, moon and stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand, heart and eye in a triangle

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows an outlined triangle containing a open hand with a solid heart in its palm, set against radiating dotted rays. Below the triangle sits an eye within a diamond shape, with a sun, a crescent moon and small stars placed around the upper part. The work is in black ink only, using bold outlines, stippled shading and fine rays, and it is photographed straight on against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the abbot has taken the copying room from me since the frost, so I am writing this by the tallow end on the back of a spoiled Vespers roll. Brother Anselm found an old pattern book behind the wine casks in the undercroft. Every leaf carries the same figure: a triangle with a hand inside it, and a heart set in the palm as neatly as a seal. The rays around the hand are dotted with a fine point, thousands of them, which must have taken someone a winter. He says the book is older than the house. I made a fair copy of the leaf with the eye beneath it, though I did not like how the eye seemed to look back at me from the vellum.

Keep reading

Anselm insists the sun and moon belong on the shoulders of the design, so the hand can hold the whole sky and not only the heart. I told him the crescent in that book has its horns turned toward the heart, which is poor astronomy and worse theology, but he laughed and said the stars were the only honest part of it, since they are only dots. We argued over the diamond under the eye until the bell for Compline, and I have not yet settled which of us was right.

The last leaf is the one the abbot wants framed. Its heart was left unfilled, a small white circle waiting. Nobody will say who inked it in. This morning I went down to check, and the heart was black and dry as a new nib. I pressed my thumb to it to be sure, and it came away with a faint dark smudge, the way fresh ink does. Nobody has been down there since Sext, and the wine casks are still sealed.

Pray for me, and burn this letter after you read it. Your brother in the cold, Ambrose.

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