Close-up photograph of a blue outlined symbol with a filled centre tattooed on an ankle, with dark linework.

Blue outlined eye symbol on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A close-up of a stylised symbol tattooed on the ankle. It has a thick blue outline shaped like a pointed oval with a small filled blue teardrop in the centre, and a dark edge line around the blue. The ink is solid blue, set against warm skin tones, with the tattoo placed centrally in the frame over a soft-focus background.

Ankle Symbol Eye Oval Teardrop Outline

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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

The lamp had gone out at Scarrow Head twice that week, and the relief boat wouldn't come before Thursday. You climb the iron stairs with the paraffin can knocking against your shin, counting the 117 steps the way your father taught you, out loud, so the numbers keep the wind out of your head.

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At the top the lens is a cage of brass and prisms, cold to the touch. Someone has scratched a little blue eye into the glass of the watch window, the sort of thing children draw on a slate. You rub at it with your sleeve and it won't come off. The log says the wick was trimmed in March, and the wick is fine. It is the glass that's clouded, a grey film the sea has thrown up over forty winters.

You clean it by hand, rag and vinegar, pane by pane, until the beam finds the water again. Out past the Knuckle a trawler swings its bow towards you, slow, the way a fish turns when it has made up its mind. Its own light answers yours, blue and then gold, and you realise the crew is reading you the way you have been reading them all night.

When the lamp catches you go down to the kitchen, fill the kettle, and leave the watch window open a crack so the little eye can keep looking. Thursday, the relief boat. Tell them the glass is clean. Tell them someone was watching.