Traditional style tattoo of an eye within a screwed metal plaque with red rays and a red drop, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye plaque on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an open eye with a green iris and a white highlight, set inside a shield-shaped plaque with corner screws and a horizontal bar. Red rays fan out behind the eye, and a red drop sits in a lower panel. Bold black outlines, flat areas of colour and soft shading on the metal create a classic traditional look, set against a plain skin background.

Traditional Forearm Eye Ray Drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass plate has hung on the harbour office door since before the ferry was a ferry, and the first thing Mrs Tallis tells you is that the eye in it is not decoration. You are twelve, the wind off the Sound is already cutting through your jersey, and she hands you a tin of polish and a rag that smells of paraffin.

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"Every boat that comes round the point, the eye sees her in," she says. "Every one that leaves without paying, the eye sees that too." You believe her, because the screws are fat and the bar across the middle has been worn bright by a century of hands pulling the door shut. The red rays fan out behind the iris the way the sun does at six o'clock in February, when the cold is sharp enough to make your teeth ache.

You polish it every Saturday through the winter. You learn the corners where the verdigris hides, and you learn the small red bead in the lower panel, which Mrs Tallis says was once the last of the lamp oil and is now only a reminder to fill the lamps. One morning the ferry brings a crate of oil and the bead is cloudy with salt. You scrub until the glass runs clear, and for the first time you see your own face caught in the green of the iris, small and pink and squinting.

When Mrs Tallis dies in March, the plate stays where it is. The new harbour master asks you to take it down, and you refuse, and he laughs and tells you to keep at it. So you do. Each Saturday you lift the rag to the eye, and each Saturday the eye seems to look back at you, patient as the tide, waiting to see who you will become.