Close photo of a man's hands crossed at the wrist, with small triangle and dot tattoos on the fingers and a coloured eye tattoo on the back of one hand, in a mixed black and grey and colour style.

Finger triangles and an eye on the hands

Realism · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are crossed in front of a black top, showing small outlined triangles, dots and simple symbols on the fingers, along with a larger tattoo of an eye on the back of one hand. The finger designs use clean black linework, while the eye is shaded with grey tones and touches of orange and purple. A tattooed forearm is visible at the top and right edges, and a silver chain, rings and bracelets are worn alongside the ink.

Realism Geometric Hand Forearm Eye Triangle Dot Symbol Finger tattoo Abstract pattern Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow House has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs, counting landings the way your nan counted rosary beads. Fourteen floors. By the ninth your thighs are complaining and the strip light on the eighth has begun its slow stutter. Someone has chalked three small triangles on the wall beside flat 8C, each with a dot beneath it, the way the old night men used to mark which doors were safe to knock on.

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Nobody has told you what the marks mean. Dee at the corner shop says they are for the rent collectors, Malik says they are for the lads who sell from the bin store, and Mrs Okafor on six says they are nothing, just children with chalk. You believe none of them. What you have is the eye, a painted-looking disc screwed to the stairwell window in April, its iris the colour of marmalade, watching the car park with the patience of a heron. Every night you check it the way you check your pockets for keys.

On the fourteenth floor the roof door is propped with a brick. Up there the wind carries frying onions and wet concrete, and the city lies spread out below, orange lamps and the dark gap where the river runs. You sit on the parapet with your back to the drop and wait for the one thing you came up for: a torch flashing three short pulses from the estate across the road, answered by a single light in your own window. It comes. Three, then one.

You climb down before dawn, past the triangles and the watching eye, and at the eighth floor you stop and add a second dot beneath the chalk. Tomorrow someone will see it and know the code has held one more night.