Traditional style tattoo of a green eye set in a grey book cover, framed by cobwebs and green clouds, on the leg.

Eye in a book with cobwebs and clouds

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A book stands open at an angle with a large green eye at its centre, surrounded by a grey metal-edged frame and stitch-like lines across the cover. Cobwebs and green cloud shapes sit around the book on the outside edges. The bold black outlines are filled with flat grey shading and green, tan and pink tones on a light skin background.

Traditional Other Book Eye Cloud

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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

Nobody binds a book round an eye unless someone has asked them to, and Mr Pell never told me who had asked him. I was fourteen when the commission came up the Holloway steps in a crate packed with grey cobweb-silk. Inside lay a ledger with pewter-edged oak boards, a brass clasp shaped like a hand, and a cover already stitched in twine, pricked through in a neat herringbone that looked as if someone had been trying to keep something in.

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The eye was painted last, by him alone, with a brush no thicker than a hair. Green as bottle glass, the iris cut so fine I could see the lamp in it. When I asked whose eye it was, he wiped his hands on his apron and said the book kept the accounts of the street, and the eye was the street's own, looking back at anyone who opened it. Cloud came off the boards like steam off a kettle, and the spiders spun across the hinge every night however often I swept.

I did not open it for eleven years. When Mr Pell died in the wet March, his will left me the shop, the crate and the ledger, with a note in his cramped hand: Do not lock it. That first evening alone, I heard the clasp click open by itself, and I read my own name at the top of a page I had never seen. Beneath it was a list of every debt I had left unpaid since I was fourteen, written in green ink that was still wet.

I paid them all that night, one at a time, to the penny, and the eye closed slowly, like a cat deciding to sleep. The ledger has not left the shelf since. I keep a lamp lit at the foot of the stair, because the book is quieter when someone is watching it back.