Black line drawing of two eyes framed by long-nailed hands, one eye with a single tear running down the cheek, shown as a tattoo design on plain paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hands framing eyes with a tear

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows two eyes with heavy lids and lashes, partly covered by several hands with long, pointed black-tipped nails. A single solid black tear falls from the right eye. The clean outlines are uniform in weight, set against a plain light grey background.

Eye Hand Tear Nail Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You keep the tiller steady with your knee while the lock fills, because your hands are needed for the windlass and the mooring line, and because nobody on the towpath is watching you do either. Gillian at the lock office calls you the girl with the bad temper, and you have decided to take that as a compliment.

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Your father's boat, the Patience, sits tied at the far end of the basin with a card in the back window that reads FOR SALE in his careful capitals. He taught you to read water before you could read the sign on the lock beam. A canal tells you what it wants, he used to say, if you keep still long enough to hear it. You have not kept still since the funeral, and the water has been saying nothing at all.

On the last morning of the month you see a stranger's terrier standing on the roof of the Patience, barking at a moorhen, and you laugh so hard you have to press the back of your wrist to your mouth. The laugh folds over into something else halfway through. You let it. The gates are closed, the heron on the bottom step has not bothered to look up, and nobody is near enough to pretend they did not see.

The tear slides down past your jaw and drops into the cut, a small black ring that spreads across the grey water and then is gone. The heron does not move. Behind you the paddles drop with a long iron groan, the gates swing open, and the Patience's card keeps turning slowly in the window, unread by anyone who knew him.