Black ink hamsa hand tattoo with ornate detail, centred between the shoulder blades on the upper back of a woman with her palms pressed together behind her.

Hamsa hand tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her hair in a loose bun and her palms pressed together at the lower back. A dark, ornamental hamsa hand tattoo sits between the shoulder blades, with an eye motif and fine interior pattern. The warm, muted tone of the photo keeps the focus on the tattoo against a plain cream wall.

Back Hamsa Hand Eye Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the fire, child, and keep your hands where I can see them. You want to know why the hand has an eye in its palm? Then hush, and I will tell you about Efendi Halim, who carved hands for every door in the Kerem valley and never once carved one for himself.

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His neighbour Fatma watched those wooden hands hung above every threshold and laughed that they were only wood and gossip. Her sister's goats sickened, her husband's wheat blighted, and she was certain the carver had cursed them with his eye. One winter the carved eye fell from the lintel of Halim's own shop, and his son took to his bed with a fever that would not break. Halim sat three nights over a block of olive wood with his knife. Each time he cut the eye, the grain split along the same crack, as if the wood would not look at the child for him.

On the fourth morning Fatma came to the shop with a basket of bread and her face grey with shame. Halim did not ask her why. He only said, "Then carve it, if you think it is so easy," and gave her his knife. She cut a small eye into the palm, and when she finished, the eye was looking straight back at her from the wood.

The boy got well by the spring. Fatma's eye is still on the lintel of her house, and her grandchildren say that if you press your palm flat against that wall, you can feel it watching the one who is lying.