Black and grey tattoo design drawing of an eye inside an ornate triangle, with a fan shell and dotted chains below, in a dotwork and geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye in triangle with shell and dotted chains

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pencilled drawing of a tattoo design showing an open eye with a shaded iris set inside an ornate triangle. The triangle border is stippled, and the interior is filled with filigree scrollwork. Below it hang a shaded fan shell and two strings of dotted chains on a plain pale background.

Dotwork Geometric Eye Triangle Shell Filigree Scrollwork Dotted chain Ornament

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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

The sign painter had been dead a week before anyone thought to ask who would finish the booth. Mae Corran climbed the ladder behind the dodgems with a tin of gold size under one arm and a brush between her teeth, and found the old panel propped against the generator, its triangle half done. Someone had started the iris and given up.

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The Eye belonged to Madame Orla, who read palms in a canvas tent at the end of the row, and who had insisted it be the only thing on Tolley's Travelling Fair with its lid open. Mae stippled the border dot by dot, the way her father had taught her, while the bulbs strung between the stalls began to flicker on in the dusk. The scrollwork was the hard part. She had to follow his pencil lines curl by curl without making them her own.

On the third night a boy from the coconut shy came to watch. He asked why the shell hung below the eye like a dropped purse. 'Madame Orla says shells are for listening,' Mae said, not looking down. 'Hold one to your ear and you get the sea from somewhere else.' The boy laughed and ran off before she could say the rest, which was that her father had never once been able to hear the sea from the fairground, and she had never told Madame Orla that.

When the last gold dot was dry, Madame Orla climbed up to look, and stood there so long the generator coughed twice. Then she paid Mae in coppers and said the Eye would see the whole route now, from the car park to the tide line. The dotted chains caught the light as the lamps came on, and for the first time in a week the board looked as though someone had been awake all night watching over it.