Three black ink flash drawings on cream paper showing a crystal ball with flowers, a hand with a dotted trail and an eye with flowers, beside a pen and pencil.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three flash designs: crystal ball, hand and eye

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Three separate pen drawings on cream sheets show a crystal ball resting on a small plinth with a sunburst and flowers, a hand with sparkles and a dotted trail, and an eye in a sphere with rays and leafy blooms. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled dots and short rays adding texture, and the drawings are entirely black ink with no colour. Each design is arranged as a separate sheet on a dark red fabric surface, with a marker and pencil placed across the lower edge.

Botanical Dotwork Hand Eye Flower Sunburst Sparkle Star Dot Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Wren, you will not believe what the pedlar left on the stile the morning after the frost. Three sheets of card, rolled tight and tied with red thread, with nothing written on them but drawings. Father wanted them burned. Mother said the sheets were too fine to waste, so I have them pinned above my bed, and I look at them more than I should.

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The first shows a glass ball on a small brass dish, a sun rising behind it in spikes like a crown, and roses tangled beneath with a flower I cannot name. The second is a hand, open and quiet, with a string of dots running off its fingers toward the edge of the page, and stars scattered where the thumb ought to be. The third is an eye inside a sphere, lids half lifted, leaves spilling round it as if it has been left out in the hedge for a season.

Yesterday I took the hand into the forest, to the place where the birches give way to beeches, and held my palm out the way the drawing shows. Nothing happened, of course. But the dots seemed to lead my eye, and I noticed a boot print pressed fresh in the mud, then another, then a snag of red thread on a thorn. Follow the dots, I told myself, and see where the pedlar went.

They brought me to a clearing where a stone plinth stood with a glass ball resting on it, cloudy as milk. Beside it lay the pedlar's satchel, empty, and a fourth sheet of card with an eye drawn on it, the lid just beginning to lift. When I looked up from the paper, the trees had gone very still, and something in the leaves was watching me. I have not slept well since, but I am certain of one thing. The drawings were never meant to be looked at. They were meant to be followed.

Your loving sister, Ada