Colourful eye tattoo with black linework, spiky rays and orange, blue and purple wash shading on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye with spiked rays on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised eye sits at the centre of the design, with a black outline, a blue iris and a yellow highlight, above a fan of long spiked rays. Loose orange, yellow, blue and purple washes bleed outward and run downward in drips beneath the rays, with black sketchy linework along the lids and rays. The tattoo is shown on a person's forearm against a tiled floor, with a denim skirt and a white top visible at the edge of the frame.

Forearm Eye Ray Spike Ink drip Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been at the banner for three nights before Mrs Oakes noticed, and by then the yellow had run off the spiked rays and down the canvas like egg yolk. You stand at the back of the Lucky Dell caravan with a jam jar of turpentine and a brush you have been told not to waste, looking up at the eye you painted in June. It still watches the dodgems. That was the brief: an eye above the entrance that sees everyone who pays at the gate and nobody who doesn't.

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Mrs Oakes wants it gone. She says a fair is noise and sugar and nothing that stares back. Her husband sold the Ferris wheel in March, and now the ghost train is the only thing left with a grudge, and she says the eye has frightened the small ones at the candyfloss stall. You tell her the colours came from the same tins as the dodgem cars. She tells you the drips look like something bleeding. You tell her you can fix the drips. You can't fix the rain.

That night you climb the ladder with a pot of blue, meaning to paint over the iris while the field is quiet. The wind comes off the wet grass and the paint is still soft, so the drips keep sliding down past the rays towards the gravel, where the fairground lights lie broken in the puddles. Each run of colour finds a puddle and sits in it, bright and trembling, and you find yourself holding the brush without moving it.

In the morning Mrs Oakes finds you asleep on the caravan step with blue on your cheek. She looks up at the eye for a long time, then goes inside to put the kettle on and says nothing about it at all.