Collage of five tattoo photos: a traditional hamsa with an eye on the foot, a small colour hamsa on the hip, and three black cat faces with red accents on the leg.

Hamsa and cat tattoos in a collage

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows five photographs of tattoos on skin. The top left and top right images show hamsa hand designs with an eye motif, one on the top of a foot and one on the side of the body, with bold black outlines and small areas of red and yellow. The three lower images show a cat face in black shading with red ears and yellow eyes, with the cat in the centre bottom panel also wearing a small crescent moon on its forehead.

Traditional Other Hamsa Hand Eye Cat Crescent moon Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is low, and I will not tell this twice. On Harrowmere Quay the gulls had stopped flying by the time Mags Tulliver came down the steps with her black cat under one arm and a tin charm in the other. The cat was called Sable, though nobody on the quay gave names to cats, and it had yellow eyes that could pick out the lamps of the drowned boats.

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The charm was the sort sold at the Thursday market to keep the evil eye from the door. Its palm had a single eye open at the centre, ringed in red, and it hung above the lintel of every house from the fish market to the lighthouse. Mags nailed it up beside the cat's basket. Sable sat on the sill with a small crescent moon bright on his brow and watched the dark water with the patience of something that had been waiting a long time.

Then came the autumn the sea took the bell from the harbour and rang it anyway, every night, somewhere under the water. Men walked to the edge of the slipway and came back grey. Mags did not walk to the edge. She sat by the window with the cat, and each night Sable rose, stretched, and stared down at the harbour until the ringing stopped.

Nobody asked what passed between them. In spring they found the bell lying on the mud, green and silent, and a smear of red on the sill where the cat had sat. The hand above the door had turned its eye towards the sea, and it has looked there ever since, so mind your step on the quay, and keep your own eye open.