Blue pen sketch of an ornamental design with paisley leaves, a fish with scale detail, an open eye and flowers, shown without any body part.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paisley, fish and eye design sketch

Colour · Flash

A blue ballpoint line drawing of an ornamental design arranged in a vertical column. It includes a tall paisley-style panel with leaves and droplets, a fish with scale shading near the centre, an open eye with radiating lashes on the right, and flower shapes at the lower left. The linework is light and sketchy on a plain white background, with no shading or fill.

Paisley Fish Eye Flower Leaves Scale Droplet Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the kettle's still warm, and mind the third step, it has opinions. You know the Pennick breakwater? Before the lamp was built, there was only the eye. Old Tobias Venn cut it into the sea wall himself, a ring of lashes spread out like a tide fan, so the boats coming in off the grey water would know someone was watching them.

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His daughter Marion kept the fish. Every morning she walked the stones with a basket of herring heads and a shawl the colour of mussel shells, and she fed the great silver-backed thing that lived in the weed under the steps. Its scales were stacked like coins, and when the sun caught them the whole bay seemed to wink. The fishermen said it was the eye's own fish, sent out each dawn to bring back word of the tides.

The winter Marion's boy went out in the Candlemas squall, nobody in Pennick spoke for three days. On the fourth morning the fish came up the slipway at first light, dragging a coil of rope in its teeth, and laid it down at the foot of the stone. Wound inside that rope was the lad, cold, coughing, and alive. Tobias swore on his mother's Bible that the eye opened its lashes and blinked at him.

So when you go down to the harbour tonight, don't throw your crusts at the gulls. Look at the wall. If the stone's wet and the lashes are shining, it means somebody's still keeping count. Now pass me that cup, and mind, I'll be wanting it back.