Black ink drawing of many small symbols on a white background, including suns, horses, eyes, crescent moons, spirals and zigzags, shown as a design sheet rather than on skin.

Sheet of ink symbols and pictograms

Black and grey · Flash

A dense sheet of hand-drawn black ink symbols arranged in a loose grid across a white background. The motifs include suns with radiating rays, horses, eyes, crescent moons, spirals, zigzags, squares, asterisks and stick-like figures. The linework is simple and uniform, with no shading, and the composition fills the whole page evenly.

Sun Horse Eye Crescent moon Spiral Zigzag Square Asterisk Figure Star Wave Symbol

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm sets the sheet on the lectern and tells you not to touch the ink with your thumb, because the ink is older than the abbey roof and smells faintly of cedar smoke. You have spent three weeks learning the signs. The sun with its rays drawn like a child's idea of light, the horse with four stiff legs, the open eye, the crescent moon lying on its back. Anselm says the traveller who brought it walked in from the salt marshes with the sheet rolled in oilcloth, and not one brother at Saint Oswin's can read a single mark.

Keep reading

Your task is simple: copy every sign onto vellum, in order, without improving any of them. Anselm is firm about the improving. Twice you have caught yourself straightening a zigzag or closing a square that had been left open, and twice he has taken your pen and given you bread and water until vespers.

On the ninth day the bell for the lesser hours rings early, and when you return to the lectern the sheet has shifted. Not much. The sun sits lower on the page, the moon has turned to face the window, and a new figure stands in the bottom corner where the margin was clean. The figure is thin, with one arm raised, as if it were calling someone in from the fields.

You stare at it until the candle gutters. Then you dip the pen, copy it stroke for stroke the way you were taught, and only after the ink has dried do you notice that the figure's raised hand is pointing towards the abbot's cell.