Pencil drawing of a planchette-shaped tattoo design with a shaded eye, a sun and a crescent moon with a face, a crystal, and the words Speak to me no more.

Planchette with eye, sun and moon design

Colour · Flash

A pencil sketch of a planchette-shaped design framed by a beaded border. A shaded eye sits at the centre, with a face-like sun and a crescent moon with a star below, a faceted crystal hanging beneath, and the phrase SPEAK TO ME NO MORE lettered along the base. The drawing is rendered in purple-tinted pencil on pale paper with a pencil lying across the top right corner.

Eye Sun Moon Crystal Bead Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, all of you, because a story goes cold same as a tent in October. You want to hear about Madame Orsolya's board? Walnut planks, a pointer shaped like a little cathedral, and a glass eye set in its middle that she swore never once blinked. For eleven summers it earned Pell's Travelling Marvels more coppers than the fire-eater and the performing bear put together.

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Then the crowds thinned. The big top lost its red, the bear went to a farm near Stroud, and the fire-eater took a job selling insurance in Bristol. Only Orsolya stayed, sitting nightly beneath the painted sun and moon lamps with Tobiah, the boy who trimmed the wicks, watching the pointer slide across the board with no hands on it. It spelled out the names of dead aunts, the price of bread, and once, very politely, the word HUNGRY.

Tobiah asked her why it kept coming back. She said the board only answers what the sitter is afraid to ask, which is a fine trick for a fortune teller but a poor one for a boy of nine. So one wet night she laid her palms flat on the walnut and said, loud enough for the empty benches to hear, that she was tired of being spoken to. The pointer lifted, hovered over the letters, and the eye in its belly went dull as a sixpence. Speak to me no more, she told it, and it never did, and the board went with the wagons to a scrap yard in Frome.

Tobiah still keeps the wick trimmer in his coat. Some nights, when the lamps gutter, he swears the sun face is smiling a little wider than it used to, as though it is listening, and he says nothing back.