Black and grey traditional tattoo of an eye with teardrops inside an elongated box, framed by flowers and leaves, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye and teardrops in a box with flowers

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an eye with three teardrops beneath it, set inside an elongated, faceted box outlined with a beaded border. Two flowers with leaves sit at the top and bottom of the design. The linework is bold and black, with soft grey shading across the box and the petals, and the design is shown against a brick wall.

Traditional Upper arm Eye Teardrop Flower Leaves

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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 down, sit, the wind will have your hat off if you stand like that. You want the tale of the tin box? Then mind the shepherd's dog, he hears better than I do.

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There was a carrier called Oswin Hale who crossed the pass at Gallow Nick every Thursday with salt, needles and whatever gossip the valley would pay for. He had one rule. He never opened the long black box strapped behind his saddle, the one with the beaded edge and the brass clasp worn bright. Folk asked what was inside. He told them a clockmaker's eye, a thing to see the weather coming. They laughed, and he let them.

Then came the winter the snow sat on the pass for eleven weeks. Hale ran short of salt and sense together. On the forty-first night he lay in the lee of a boulder, heard his mare scream, and watched something rise out of the drift. An eye opened in the dark, and beneath it three drops ran down and hissed where they touched the snow. Where they fell, the snow went brown and sweet, and small flowers with grey-white petals pushed up through the crust. He understood then that the eye was not watching for weather. It was watching for whoever would lift the lid.

Hale never lifted it. He carried the box down to the chapel at Ashby Fold, dug a hole beneath the yew, and buried it with the clasp still shut. The next spring the yew put out a bloom with three petals, and every spring since, the valley says, it has rained once on the pass for no reason the forecasters can name.