Pencil drawing of a mechanical eye with a blue iris, cogs, screws and ornate filigree panels, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mechanical eye with gears and filigree

Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a human eye with lashes, with its iris and surrounding panels rendered as metal mechanisms. A grey cog sits at the lower centre, and screws and ornate scrollwork frame the eye on both sides. The shading is soft graphite with strong highlights, and only the iris is coloured, in blue.

Eye Mechanical Gear Cog Iris Eyelashes Filigree Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass lashes were the last thing Brother Anselm could not get to sit straight, and he had been bent over them since Lauds with a jeweller's loupe pressed to one eye and the cold of the workshop creeping up through his sandals. Outside the window the fen lay grey to the horizon. On the bench sat a wide, sleepy lid of beaten metal, its iris a disc of blue enamel the colour of the river before a hard frost.

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Prior Gerard had asked for it in October. The statue of St Lucy in the north cloister had lost her painted eyes to damp years ago, and the novices complained that she looked past them when they knelt. "Give her a sight," he had said, "something that keeps the hours." So Anselm had taken the old escapement from a scrapped carriage clock in Wisbech, cut its wheels into scrolls and panels, pinned them round the eye like armour, and hidden a single grey cog beneath the pupil where the heart of a watch would be.

On the vigil of St Lucy the frost was hard enough to ring the pans. Anselm fixed the last lash, wound the spring with a key no longer than his little finger, and set the eye into the saint's face. For a long moment nothing happened. Then the cog ticked, the blue disc swung a hair to the left, and the eye found the church door, where Brother Edwin had crept in late with snow on his hood and stopped dead under the gaze.

Edwin confessed afterwards that he had expected a rebuke. Anselm had none to give. He only wondered, as he scraped the filings from under his nails, how long the old clock would keep its hours inside a saint, and whether he would be winding her every morning for the rest of his life. It was the first thing he had ever made that could see him back, and he found he did not mind being watched.