Black ink flash drawing of a planchette with a central eye, YES and NO lettering, a sunburst and acanthus scrolls, in a dotwork and blackwork style.

Planchette with eye and acanthus scrolls

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a pointed planchette with a circular window, a central eye with radiating lashes, and the words YES and NO in circular cartouches. A sunburst sits behind the top point, and symmetrical acanthus scrolls spread out along the bottom. The linework is fine and even, with stippled dotwork shading on the planchette and a hand holding a pen at the top left.

Dotwork Blackwork Eye Sunburst Acanthus Scroll Moon Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had not touched the planchette since the big top came down in Doncaster, but on the last Sunday of the season she unwrapped it from its tea towel and set it on the trestle inside the fortune tent anyway. The canvas smelled of wet sawdust, and the pennants along the guy ropes had faded to the colour of weak tea. Outside, the lion's van idled with its doors chained shut, and somebody was counting wages in coins on the back step.

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She rested two fingers on the pale wooden runner the way her grandmother had taught her, light as a moth, and asked the question she had been rehearsing for a month. Would the show go on past the winter? The runner stirred. It slid beneath the moon, beneath the eye with its heavy lashes, and stopped under YES with a small dry click, as if it had been waiting for someone honest enough to lean on it.

She did not believe a word of it. She knew her own hands moved in the dark when the lamps were low, and her grandmother used to say the board only answered to people who wanted something badly enough to push. Ada pushed. The runner slid back across the paper and settled at NO, and she sat very still, listening to the coins rattle in the tin outside.

Tomas shouldered through the flap with the takings in a biscuit tin and a face like wet cardboard. "Well?" he said. "Did the board say we're finished?"

"It said no," she told him, and turned the planchette face down before he could read it. "Now I've got to work out what the question was."