Black and grey dotwork and engraved tattoo of a hand holding a quill above a faceted icosahedron, placed on the side of the ribs.

Quill hand above a geometric d20

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holds a feather quill upright, rendered with fine engraved hatching, and rests on a faceted icosahedron shaded with stippled dotwork. Thin geometric circles sit behind the base, and a small crescent moon and a partial hand appear lower left. The image is in black and grey with a dark, softly lit background.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Hand Quill Feather Moon Circle Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The die came to Aldous Pym in payment for a will he had drafted for a dead icemonger, a lump of black stone cut into twenty faces. By his third winter in Coldharbour Lane the parish had stopped calling it foolishness and started calling it the Pym method. Two neighbours quarrelled over a bakehouse, they came to him, he rolled, and whatever the stone showed was written down in the copperplate he had learned from his father, the feather pen scratching until the ink went thin.

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It was fair, the parish said, because nobody could argue with a die. Odd numbers to the elder brother, even to the younger. When the stone came up fourteen the Greaves boys shook hands over a loaf and a sixpence, and Pym sanded the page and folded it into the box with the others. He did not tell them that for years he had known which faces the stone favoured when it was warm from his palm, and that he had been choosing which corner to trust.

Then his sister Margery came in out of the sleet about the mill, and he found his hand already moving. He wrote the answer first, a neat line in favour of the miller, and only then reached for the stone. It tumbled across the desk and settled on the lowest point of the twenty, and when he read the face aloud it said one.

Margery watched him look from the page to the die and back again. He set the stone on the deed like a paperweight, dipped the quill, and studied the blank space beneath the miller's name for a long while before he left it empty, the black stone holding the paper flat against the draught.