Colour traditional tattoo of a red-rimmed eye with blue tears on a leg, with a butterfly above it and a green creature below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye with tears and butterfly on a leg

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large central eye with a red sclera, green and yellow iris and blue tears runs down the cheek, flanked by a butterfly with red, yellow and green wings above and a green creature head below. The bold black outlines and flat fills are typical of traditional tattooing, with some shading on the eyelid and iris. The bright palette is dominated by reds, greens and blues against pale skin, and the close crop shows the leg from knee to shorts hem.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, because the boards at the Gilded Moth lift when the band gets going, and they lifted the night Frankie Doyle tried to cut in on the wrong girl. Her name was Vera Lusk, and she wore a green dress the colour of a bottle in the sun, and every man in Brighton had a theory about her eyes. Blue tears, they said, for a sailor she'd sent off to Lisbon and never heard from again. Nonsense, said Vera. She cried in blue because her mother had mixed the ink for the sign over the door, and nobody ever washes out a thing like that.

Keep reading

Frankie wanted to dance anyway. So he crossed the floor past the cloakroom where old Ida kept the moths pinned under glass, past the bandleader sweating through his waistcoat, and he took Vera by the hand just as the trombone dropped out. The whole hall went quiet. A red light came on over the bar, the one that only glowed when somebody was about to lose a bet, and Vera looked at Frankie the way you'd look at a lost coat you'd half given up on.

He danced her three slow turns before the creature under the stage woke up and snapped at his shoe, green-scaled and hungry as a Thames eel, and that was the end of the dancing. Vera laughed until the blue ran down her cheek, and Frankie walked out into the rain with a ticket stub in one hand and a moth's wing stuck to his palm, and he never once asked her name again.

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