Black and grey fine line hamsa hand tattoo on the forearm, with ornamental patterns and a shaded eye at its centre.

Hamsa hand with an eye on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed hamsa hand tattoo sits on the forearm, filled with ornamental scrollwork, leaf-like motifs and small dotted accents. A shaded eye is set within a radiating sunburst ring at the centre of the palm. The linework is fine and precise, with soft grey shading, and the design is centred on the forearm against a plain grey background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Hamsa Hand Eye Ornament Mandala Scrollwork Floral Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Brother Anselm, the ink has finally dried on the hand, though Abbot Matthias still will not look at it. You asked in your last letter whether the Lenten psalter was finished on time. The psalter is finished, but the hand is not, because I could not bring myself to close the palm around the eye without first asking what the widow Oda wanted it to do.

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She came up the mule track from the salt village in February with her boy, who had been coughing since the frost. She carried a tin of ground cumin and a drawing on a scrap of goatskin: a hand with its fingers spread, and at its centre an eye ringed with rays like a child's sun. She asked me to paint it on the flyleaf of the boy's gospel so that the eye would watch the bad air before it watched him. I told her the Rule forbids such things. She said the Rule had never met her son.

So I made it at night, with the lamp turned low and the door barred. I gave the palm all the scrollwork the Rule allowed and more: leaves curling from the fingers, dotted borders like beads on a rosary, a small diamond at the heart of the middle finger where a lesser illuminator would have stopped. I shaded the eye last. My hand kept lifting from it. Each time I came back, the iris seemed a fraction darker, as if someone on the far side of the vellum had been breathing on it.

The boy is sleeping through the night, Oda says, and her cumin is in the refectory soup, which I am told is an improvement. Brother Matthias has asked me to scrape the flyleaf. I have told him I will, after Easter, if the eye has grown tired of watching us. Pray for my hand, and for the ink, which I have decided is holy because it has seen so much of the dark. Yours in the cold scriptorium, Brother Petrus.