Traditional style tattoo of a red and yellow flower with an eye inside a heart across the back of a hand, with a chrysanthemum on the forearm above.

Eye in heart flower on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

A large flower made of layered red, yellow and orange petals with green leaves covers the back of the hand, with a green and yellow eye set inside a red heart at its centre. Bold black outlines and solid fills give the piece a classic traditional finish. A chrysanthemum tattoo runs up the forearm above, and short lettering is visible across the fingers.

Traditional Botanical Hand Forearm Flower Eye Heart Chrysanthemum Mandala Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the night shift at Harrowgate Cottage Hospital, the porter Ada Pimm kept a brass lamp lit at the far end of Ward Four, because her grandmother had told her the green glass eye in its shade would see what the dark was hiding. Nobody else believed it. The night sister said it drew moths to the window in June and that was all it was good for.

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One February a man came in off the moor road with his left hand bound in a cloth gone brown at the knuckles. He would not give his name. He kept opening and closing his fingers, and each time he did, Ada saw a red flower on the back of the hand, its petals banded in yellow and orange, a green eye sitting in a red heart at its centre. The eye turned when the hand turned, the way a cat's head follows a sound.

At three in the morning the eye looked straight at her. 'It isn't mine to keep,' he said. 'Give it back to whoever lent it.' Ada asked who that might be. He nodded at the black window, then at the jug of bronze chrysanthemums on the sill, their heads bowed over the lamp. She carried the jug out into the frost and tipped the flowers under the lamp post at the gate. When she came back the cloth lay folded on the empty bed and the window was shut from the inside.

By dawn there was a red flower pressed into the frost by the gate, petals edged in gold, and a green glint at its heart where the sun caught the lamp glass. Ada kept the lamp burning every night after that, though the eye in its shade never turned again.