Black ink drawing of a planchette design with a central eye, YES, NO and GOODBYE lettering and dotwork shading on a white sheet.

Planchette with eye and YES NO GOODBYE lettering

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a planchette shape with a large eye at its centre, a circular cut-out above, and the words YES, NO and GOODBYE worked into the design. Ornamental swirls and scrollwork fill the spaces around the lettering. Fine black linework is used throughout, with dotwork stippling shading the thickness of the planchette's edge and parts of the scrollwork. The image is in black ink only, shown on white paper beside a black pen.

Dotwork Lettering Eye Scrollwork Swirl Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair packed up on a Sunday, but the planchette never went into the lorry with the rest of the kit. Dad kept it wrapped in a moth-eaten tablecloth under the ticket booth, and every October, when the rides came down in the rain at the edge of Market Harrow, he would unwrap it and wait for me to sit across from him. Nan's pen had worn the varnish off the eye in the middle, so the painted iris looked as though it had been crying.

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"Who's there?" I asked, the way Nan had taught me, my fingertips barely touching the wood. The planchette slid up toward the round hole at the top, then down to YES, then across to NO, back and forth, as if it were arguing with itself. Dad laughed the way he laughed at a bad till roll. "It's always been a bad-tempered thing," he said. "Like your gran."

Then it stopped on GOODBYE and would not move. Dad's hand had gone still on the cloth. He had been selling the fair for a month to a man from Ipswich with a chequebook, and I had heard him on the phone in the caravan, saying yes, yes, the Sunday after next. I asked whether he wanted me to put the question to the board. He shook his head. "It only ever answers the one question," he said, "and it's never the one you ask."

I lifted my fingers. The planchette stayed where it was for a long breath, then drifted by itself to YES, slow as a tide turning. I folded the cloth over the eye and carried it out past the empty stalls to the lorry, where the rain had already started to wash the letters clean.