Green-toned flash design of a large eye whose iris becomes a scaled wave, with a hummingbird, a sailing ship and pale pink blossom on a beige background.

Eye with waves, hummingbird and blossom flash

Colour · Flash

A large eye sits at the lower left, its iris rendered in detailed green shading, and its lid and tear line are drawn in fine black linework. The eye flows into a curling wave with scale texture, a small sailing ship on the swell, and a hummingbird hovering at the upper left. Branches with pale pink blossoms rise from the top right against a plain tan background.

Eye Wave Hummingbird Ship Blossom Branch Scale Sea

Find an artist for this

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

The cook on the Marigold had a rule about the sea: never look straight down into it at dawn, because it looks back. Nobody aboard believed him until the morning the green swell rose alongside the hull like a lid lifting, and there was an iris in it the size of a church door, wet and patient, with a thread of brine running down its lower lid. Bosun Pell dropped his bucket. The ship's boy wanted to climb the mast. Only Odile, who had sailed with her father's crew since she was nine, walked to the rail and said good morning to it, because her mother had told her that was how you greeted an eye that had seen you first.

Keep reading

The eye blinked. The water folded over itself in long curls, scaled like a mackerel's back, and lifted the Marigold a yard higher than any tide could. A hummingbird came out of nowhere and hung in the air between the sails, its beak pointed at the sun, and it did not seem to mind the salt. Somewhere on the crest, pink blossom spilled off a branch that had no tree beneath it, and the petals drifted down onto the deck and stayed there, soft and unwilted.

Nobody ate breakfast that day. Odile kept the cook's rule for the rest of her life and added one of her own: when the sea looks back, let it see you doing something ordinary. She spent the morning mending a torn jib with a needle, and the eye watched her stitch every seam until the wave sank back under the hull and left the ship rocking gently on flat water, a little lighter for the petals in the bilge.