Black ink tattoo of a temple with spires, an eye and stars above, and two open hands with water drops below, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Temple with hands and eye on a back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A central temple or castle with tall spires and a dotted, scalloped base sits above two open hands with cuffed wrists and small falling drops. An eye and a cluster of stars sit above the spires, and short radiating lines flank the hands. The work is solid black linework with dotwork stippling in the roof and base, and the image is shown in black and grey on bare skin.

Dotwork Blackwork Back Castle Hand Eye Star Spire Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spring had stopped again, and Ilse knew she would be the one who had to climb for it. She shouldered the yoke with its two copper buckets and started up the goat track above Harrow Pass, where the rock turned the grey of wet slate and the wind carried the smell of cold stone. Below her the lowland ponds were already cracking at their edges, the carp gone silver and sluggish under a sky that had not rained since the thaw.

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At the top stood the shrine her grandmother had called the Little Palace, a stack of spires cut into the cliff, its base carved in overlapping scales like a fish that had leapt out of the river and frozen mid-air. Nobody locked it. Nobody needed to. Above the door hung a bronze eye the size of a dinner plate, and the old tellers said it watched who came to take water, and watched more closely those who came to take too much.

She knelt at the basin and filled both buckets, then, because her grandmother had also said so, she cupped her hands and held them out over the stone the way the carved figures did, palms open, wrists bare. For a long moment nothing happened. Then a single drop gathered on the lip of the basin, fell onto her knuckles and rolled down into her palm, cold as a coin. She carried the water home without spilling a drop, and when she tipped it into the ponds, the carp turned their gold flanks toward the surface as if they had been waiting to be asked.