Colour tattoo of a stylised Mesoamerican-style face with an eye and red circles, in traditional style, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Aztec-style eye motif on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of a stylised Mesoamerican-style motif, with a central eye, a triangular crest and symmetrical side panels. Thick black outlines enclose flat fills of ochre, mustard yellow, red, green and brown, with small geometric bands and dots on the panels. The design is centred on pale skin with a few freckles, and partial black lettering or star shapes are visible at the top edge of the frame.

Traditional Thigh Eye Sun Geometric pattern Circle Triangle

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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

Sit nearer the stove, and mind the coal bucket, it bites. No, the light doesn't blink, whatever the Hartley boys told you in the pub. It turns, and it has one great eye, and that eye was painted on by a keeper called Tomas Verity the summer the fog sat on Carrick Head for eleven days.

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He had no ladder long enough, so he hung off the gallery rail with a tin of ochre on his belt and a brush clenched in his teeth. He'd copied the sun from a book borrowed from the Penzance library, a picture of a stone wheel made by people across the ocean who counted their years by looking up. He hadn't the right colours. He mixed mustard from the boathouse, red from a jar of rust, and green he stole from the cook's peas. He painted the crest like the bow of a fishing smack, pointing up at nothing, and every side panel with little bands and dots, because he said a sun should have something to hold.

The fog did not lift for the paint. It lifted because the wind came round to the north on the twelfth morning, and the first thing the boats saw coming out of the grey was that painted eye, staring back at them with the lamp burning behind it. The Marigold came home that night with all six men aboard.

Tomas never climbed the gallery rail again. His daughter Ada is the one who told me this, and she used to press her thumb into the dried ochre on the door every time she went through it. Go on, press your thumb to it the way she did. The paint's still warm, or so I've always told myself.