Black and grey traditional style tattoo of an eye within an ornate scrolled frame with rays, on the inner forearm.

Eye in an ornate frame on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single eye with a shaded iris and pupil sits at the centre of an oval frame decorated with acanthus scrolls, leaves and dotted lines. Fine radiating rays fan out behind the eye, and dotted lines trail from the frame, extending across the forearm. The tattoo is rendered in black ink with grey shading, with bold outlines and stippled texture on the scrolls and background.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Eye Frame Scroll Ray Leaves Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ailsa Crane had sent the carriage for Hollis Dunmore at first light, and by the time it reached the foot of the Corran Pass he had resolved not to look at the dead man's face. He had painted eyes before, small oval miniatures for lockets and silver frames, and the trade had taught him that the eye was the only part a sitter could be asked to give. The rest could be guessed from a daguerreotype and a good memory.

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The house stood above the tree line where the road gave out, its shutters closed against the wind. Mrs Crane met him in the hall with a sealed box and a black ribbon. Inside lay a folded note in a clerk's hand and a glass eye the colour of weak tea, fitted by a surgeon that spring. "He wanted it painted as it was," she said, "and not as the illness made it." Hollis unrolled his brushes, ground his ivory black, and began with the rays, fine as horsehair, fanning from the pupil the way lamplight once fell through a study window.

Hours passed. The dotted lines came last, pricked in with the finest point, a route of small stops running out of the frame like a surveyor's marks across the hills. Mrs Crane watched from the doorway and said nothing until the candles were lit.

"You have made him look as if he means to speak," she said. Hollis wiped his brush. "Then he was listening to something," he said, and he packed his case while the road was still open below them.