Black and white line drawing of a palm tattoo design with symbols on the fingers, a sunburst eye and the words Deus Ex Machina, in a blackwork and geometric style.

Palm design with sunburst eye and numerals

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of an open left hand, palm facing the viewer, with small symbols on each finger and a large numeral eight over a sunburst eye at the centre of the palm. The words DEUS EX MACHINA and MM XII sit beneath the eye, and fine rays radiate outward from it. The work uses crisp black outlines, solid black finger bands, dotted and hatched fills, and is entirely black and grey.

Blackwork Geometric Hand Hand Palm Eye Sunburst Symbol Ray Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flyman at the Corn Exchange had a rule about the hands. Nobody touched the brass rail with bare palms after the Tuesday matinee, because the sweat ate the lacquer and the counterweights started to walk. Clem Tulley had broken that rule twice before the night the Greek god came down wrong.

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The god was meant to descend on the gantry at eight o'clock in the last act, a sunburst of painted card fanned out behind him like the rays of a lamp shade, lit from a single bulb in the wings. Somebody had chalked the cues along the boards: an 8 for the descent, XII for the house lights to die. Clem kept the sheet folded in his back pocket, soft as cloth from handling.

At the eighth cue the rope ran hot through his fingers and the god kept coming, past his mark, past the painted sky, until his gilded face hung level with the gallery rail. Nobody in the stalls moved. Clem got a hand around the brake, then the other, and the whole rig stopped dead a foot from the boards, swaying like a bell that had forgotten its note.

The director wanted to know who had rigged it. Clem said the machinery had sorted itself out, which was the only honest answer he had. The god went up again the next night on schedule. Clem kept the cue sheet, and on the back of it he drew an open hand in pencil, and beside the palm he wrote the number eight, because that was the cue he had caught.