Black and grey realism tattoo of an eye with branch-like lashes, small birds and a curled hook shape, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye with birds and drips on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed eye with a heavy brow sits at the centre of the design, its lashes drawn as bare branches that lead into a flock of small birds. Below the eye, dark dripping lines run down from the lid, and a curled hook shape with a sharp downward point sits beside them. The shading is smooth and tonal, with fine linework in the branches, and the piece is centred on the upper back.

Realism Blackwork Back Eye Eyebrow Bird Branches Drip Spiral

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you're not listening. Pass the bread along first, because this is a long one and my teeth are not what they were. Up at the top of Carrick Lane there lived a woman called Nessa Dunmore, and she had one eye that could see through a shut door. Her man, Joe Pell, went down to the herring boats one November and never came up the lane again, so every evening she sat at her front window and kept watch on the road with that eye.

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The eye grew tired of looking, as eyes do. Its lashes went thin and grey, then bare, and they reached out like the branches of the old ash by the chapel. Birds came to roost in them, starlings and little finches, and the birds carried the watching off across the county so Nessa could rest her head. Still she wept, though nobody had told her she could stop. Her tears ran down the lid and hardened into black threads that hung like wet rope, and she caught them in a tin cup the way you'd catch rain.

Joe's boat came in the following spring. He walked up Carrick Lane with a pale girl from Whitby on his arm, and the birds rose off the ash in one dark sheet. Nessa watched from the window and the eye did not blink once. She took the coal hook down from its nail, went out to meet them, and what she said to that girl I will not repeat in front of the bride.

Nobody knows where Nessa went after that. The shutter was found swinging open, the tin cup full to the brim with black threads, and the birds have been seen since, wheeling over the sea and settling on wedding gates. So if one lands on your roof tonight, don't shoo it off. It's only checking who's still watching.