Hand-drawn black ink design of a realistic eye framed by ornate acanthus-style scrollwork, being inked with a brush pen on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye within ornate scrollwork design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A realistic eye sits at the centre of a dense design of curling acanthus-style foliage and scrolls. The eye is shaded with fine hatching and stippling, while the surrounding leaves use bold solid black areas and detailed linework. The drawing is in black ink on a pale background, and a hand holding a pen is visible at the upper right.

Realism Eye Scrollwork Ornament Foliage

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

Mrs Abernethy had kept the boarding house at Scaldwell Cove for thirty-one winters, and before every first gale she drew the same eye above the front door. She worked with a steel nib and a bottle of black ink, building the acanthus leaves around the lid until the stone seemed to grow them. Her father had taught her that the sea respects a thing that is watched.

Keep reading

The summer the Pryor boy took the dinghy out past the headland, nobody thought to ask her for the drawing. The lodgers were pleased with the rooms and cross about the damp, and the eye went grey with salt and was left alone. It was Jenny from the bakery who noticed the gulls had stopped sitting on the sill. She climbed the ladder with a pot of ink and a borrowed pen, her hand shaking, and tried to copy a curl she had watched Mrs Abernethy make a hundred times.

She worked by lamplight until the leaves ran right round the lid and the pupil was a wet black hole with a single white spark in it. Near midnight the dinghy came round the rocks, oars knocking, and the Pryor boy was sitting in it, soaked and shivering, asking why the house was watching him.

At breakfast Mrs Abernethy said nothing about the ladder. She took the ink from Jenny's hand, blotted one leaf that had come out too heavy, and went back to her porridge. Some eyes, she said, are only there so the sea knows whose house it is.