Black and grey dotwork hamsa hand with a lotus and an eye at its centre, tattooed on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand and lotus with eye on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A hamsa hand sits above a lotus flower, with a large eye at the centre of the lotus and small dotted star shapes beneath it. The linework is fine and the shading uses dense dots and stippling, with ornate patterned fills in the palm and fingers. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a thigh against a dark garment and a tiled floor.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Hamsa Hand Lotus Eye Flower Mandala Dot Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the last week of August the old orchard at Pell Hollow was heavy with plums, and the miller's daughter, Hanne, was sent out to count them before the wasps got to them. Her grandmother said a count kept an orchard honest. Hanne counted four hundred and eleven, then sat under the hedge where the ground stayed cool, beside the stone basin her grandmother had carried home from the coast, with a lotus cut into its rim.

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A stranger came up the lane with a tin hand hung from his belt, its fingers pierced with patterns like lace. He asked for water. Hanne gave him the dipper from the basin, and he drank slowly and looked at her over the rim as though he were counting too. He said the orchard owed a tenth of its fruit to the hand, because the hand keeps whatever is counted. Hanne told him she had counted four hundred and eleven and he could take none of them.

He only smiled and pointed at the basin. In the water the carved lotus had opened, and at its centre sat a single eye, watching the branches. The stranger said the eye had counted too, and it had seen the plum a wasp had split on the top bough, the one Hanne had left off her tally. She climbed up and found it, sticky and bruised. When she handed it down, he cracked it open and the stone inside was spotted with small dark stars.

That night Hanne laid her palm flat on the basin, and the water rose to the rim. In the morning every plum in the orchard lay in neat rows along the wall, each one counted, and the tin hand was gone from the lane. Her grandmother looked at the rows for a long time and said only that the eye had been fed.