Black and grey hamsa hand tattoo with a realistic eye and ornamental dotwork detailing, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with an eye on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A hamsa hand sits upright on the side of the torso, with its fingers pointing up. Inside the outline, a teardrop-shaped motif with leaf-like patterns surrounds a realistic eye, and the fingers are filled with vine-like sprigs. The linework is built from fine dots along the outline and ornamental detail, with soft grey shading that gives the hand depth and dimension.

Dotwork Realism Ribs Hamsa Hand Eye Mandala Ornament Leaves Paisley

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who has to hold the tracing paper steady, because your aunt Rukhsana's hands have started to shake over fine work. The kitchen table in Bradford smells of cardamom and the rice for the reception, and she is drawing a hamsa on the back of a spare wedding card from your cousin's engagement. She wants the hand upright, fingers pointing to the ceiling, the way her mother drew it on the inside of the pantry door. Each finger gets its sprig of leaves, and the fingers shrink as they climb.

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Then comes the eye, and she will not let you help with that part. She draws the teardrop around it first, a leaf pattern nested inside a leaf pattern, with dots marching along the edge like someone counting beads on a rosary. 'Dots are for patience,' she says. 'Lines are for show.' The eye she shades last, with a soft pencil, so the iris keeps a little light in it, and she blows the graphite dust off the card before she lets you look.

On the morning of the wedding the card goes into your handbag, and you leave it at the venue beside the sweet trolley. Nobody notices until the speeches. Your uncle Javed finds it under a napkin, turns it over, and reads the note she wrote in the margin in Urdu: watch over them both. He laughs, then stops laughing, and carries it across the hall to the bride's mother, who holds it up to the window as though the eye might blink.