Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of an eye with sunburst rays and mandala petals on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye with sunburst and mandala on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A realistic eye with a green iris sits at the centre of a design of radiating yellow and orange sunburst rays, framed by a pink dotted oval. Surrounding it are teal and pink petal shapes, leaves and ornate filigree-style patterns with dotted shading. The bold black outlines and bright ink are set against the skin of the arm, with the design filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Dotwork Upper arm Eye Sunburst Mandala Petal Leaves Bead Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold still and listen, because the sea never waits for anyone who talks over the wind. The Marigold sailed out of Hull in the year the herring failed, and her figurehead was no maiden and no lion but a great round eye, gilded at the rim and ringed with pink glass beads that the carpenter's daughter had sewn on one by one. Nobody aboard liked it. Sailors want a woman in paint or a beast with teeth, not a thing that stares back at them.

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Off the Dogger Bank, in a fog thick enough to drink, the mate swore the eye had opened wider. Yellow rays came off it like a dawn that had no sun behind it, and they lit the water in long gold spokes. Tobias Quill at the wheel followed those spokes through the shoals the way you'd follow a lamp carried down a dark stair. When the fog finally lifted, the Marigold lay clear of every sandbar that had been waiting for her.

Tobias never once thanked the eye, and the old skipper said that was the only reason it kept its watch. Gratitude makes a figurehead lazy, he said, and a lazy one lets you drown. So the carpenter's daughter went on polishing its beads every spring, and the crew went on grumbling, and the sea went on being the sea.

You'll not find the Marigold's timbers now, unless you dive off Cromer on a clear day. But when the water is calm enough to see the bottom, you can still make out a round gold rim lying in the sand, with pink beads scattered about it like spilt sweets, and every one of them still pointing up at the light.