Black and grey tattoo of an open eye with a detailed eyebrow on the chest, drawn in fine engraving-style hatching and stippling.

Engraved eye with eyebrow on chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic open eye with its eyebrow and lower lid, shown in close-up on bare skin. The linework uses dense cross-hatching and stippling to build the shadows of the lids, brow hairs and iris, giving an engraved look. The image is in black and grey and is centred, with the eye filling most of the frame.

Realism Chest Eye Eyebrow Iris

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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

You take the night post on the fourteenth floor of Harrow Point because nobody else will, and because the lift has been broken since March. The landing lights hum at a pitch you have stopped hearing. On the notice board by the bin chute someone has pinned a council letter about window cleaning, and beneath it a child's drawing of a face with no mouth, only one large eye.

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Mrs Okonedo in flat 1409 says the eye arrived in the spring. She hands you a tin of shortbread and points at the wall between her kitchen and the stairwell, where a patch of render has been scraped back to brick. Someone has cross-hatched a single eye into the wall in fine grey lines, lashes and brow hairs picked out with a nail, the iris dark as coal. Every time she opens her door, she says, it seems to have turned a fraction towards her.

You tell her it is the damp, the light from the car park, the way the stippling catches the sodium lamps. You believe that until you crouch and look closely, and see the lower lid worked in exactly the same pattern as the eye on the child's drawing, the same lazy stroke at the outer corner. You photograph it with your phone. When you check the screen the iris has a small white catchlight, though the landing has no window.

Down on the ground floor the lift doors open for the first time in months. You take the stairs anyway, counting landings, and at each one you pass a small grey eye at head height, patient and engraved, and every one of them is looking up at you.