Black ink dotwork drawing of a planchette with a central eye, crescent moons, a bone, leaves and YES and NO lettering beneath a burst of rays.

Planchette with eye, moons and YES NO lettering

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a planchette-style board with a large central eye, a smaller eye and crescent moons, a bone below, and two leaves on each side. Rays of stippled dots and fine lines radiate above the shape, and the words YES and NO sit either side of it in serif lettering. The image is drawn in black on a plain white background, with the wood grain on the board shown in fine hatched lines.

Dotwork Traditional Eye Moon Bone Leaves Ray Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board had been lying face down under the flour tin since Michaelmas, and Nell Dacre took it out on the Thursday before her wedding because her sister had said a bride ought to know what the wood thought of her. Joan lit the stub of candle, put two fingers on the little wooden pointer, and told Nell to ask it plainly.

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Nell asked whether she should marry Tom Pell, the ferryman's son who had walked her home from the Whitsun fair and never once tried to kiss her on the bridge. The pointer went still. Then it slid to the word YES, paused, drifted down past the moons, and came to rest on the bone at the foot of the board. Joan went white and said the bone meant a thing you had to bury before you could go on. Nell said the bone was the old pig's knuckle from the stew and put the board back in the drawer.

Tom came up the lane that evening with a lamp in one hand and a sack of salt on his shoulder, and the first thing he said was that he had asked the board the same question the night before. It had told him NO. He said it with a grin, the kind that meant he had been waiting all afternoon to say it, and she laughed until she had to sit on the step.

They took the board out together after supper, both fingers on the wood, the candle guttering between them. Nell asked it the question again, and this time she felt Tom's hand press very gently against hers. The pointer went to YES, then, slow as a tide, to NO, and back again, and neither of them would let go long enough to say which one they had meant.