Black and grey dotwork tattoo on the upper arm, a hamsa hand with an eye in its palm merged with a skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa and skull on the upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A hamsa hand with a large eye at its centre forms the upper part of the design, and its fingers and palm are filled with ornamental scrollwork and patterned panels. The lower part of the hand becomes a skull, with its jaw, teeth and eye sockets outlined and shaded. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey, with stippled dot shading that gives the forms soft depth, and it sits centred on a smooth area of skin against a dark background.

Dotwork Upper arm Hamsa Skull Eye Hand Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The palm had been painted on the boathouse wall at Scarra for as long as anyone could remember, a hand the size of a tin tray with a single open eye at its centre, watching the harbour. Fishermen touched it before they put out. Children were told it kept the gulls off their dinners. When the damp got into the render and the new harbourmaster, a brisk man from the mainland, decided to scrape the wall for a notice board, the plaster came away in flakes and showed us something underneath: a skull grinning up through the fingers like a drowned face through green water.

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I was sixteen and sulky and had been sent to hold the bucket. I asked why anyone would paint a bone under a hand. Old Brenna in the chandlery, who had mended nets since before my mother was born, said the palm was for what you could hold back and the skull was for what you could not, and the eye sat between them to remind you which was which. She laughed as she said it, then stopped laughing and went back to her knots.

The harbourmaster wanted both gone. He said it frightened the visitors. My father, who rarely said anything at the quay, stood in front of the wall with his arms folded until the man went off to find a brush for the other side.

We left it. The notice board went up on the gable instead. Now when I go down to the boats before dawn I still put my palm flat against the painted one, the skull warm under my fingers, and I count the boats going out past the eye until the light comes up over the rocks.