Black and grey blackwork tattoo design of an eye within a triangle above an animal skull with antlers, flowers and feathers, framed by circles and geometric shapes.

Eye in triangle with skull and antlers

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing an open eye inside a large triangle, set above a horned animal skull with flowers and feathers at either side. The linework is bold and detailed, with fine hatching and stippling in the eye, skull and foliage, and heavy black brush strokes and triangles framing the composition. The image is entirely black and grey on a white background, arranged symmetrically within a circle.

Blackwork Geometric Eye Triangle Skull Antler Flower Feather Circle Brush stroke

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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

Every hospital keeps one thing awake after the lights go down, and at Hollin Moor General it was a stag's skull bolted above the double doors of the old chapel wing. Nobody on days could say who had put it there. Dorothy Acklam, who had worked nights for thirty-one years, said it had come with the building, the way damp comes.

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Dorothy told the new porter, Sam, that the skull had an eye in its forehead when the wards were quiet, and that the eye looked at whoever was awake and left the sleepers alone. Sam laughed and asked whether it also looked at the lift, which had a habit of stopping at floor four with nobody pressing anything. Dorothy said the lift was the eye's bad mood and he shouldn't take it personally.

One February a boy came in off the moor road with a split hand and a story he would not finish. Sam sat with him on the bench under the skull until the boy's mother arrived. When Sam looked up, the bone above the doors was empty, and a single feather lay on the mat, black and white, from no bird anyone had seen. Dust from the antlers had settled down the wall like frost on a windowsill.

Sam carried the feather to the desk and looked up at the triangle painted on the notice board above the nurses' station. There was an eye in it that had not been there at six o'clock. It was looking at him, mildly, the way Dorothy had said it would, and he understood that he was now the one who had to stay awake for it.