Pencil drawing of a hamsa hand design with an open eye at its centre, surrounded by leaf sprigs and scalloped dotted outlines, with soft pink shading on the fingertips.

Hamsa hand with eye and botanical filigree

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A detailed drawing of a hamsa hand with an eye at its centre, framed by a scalloped border of dots and loops. Fine ink linework and pencil shading give the eye, leaves and petal shapes depth, and a mirrored, mandala-like layout organises the composition. The design is mostly grey and black, with soft pink-mauve tints on the fingertips and hand edges.

Botanical Geometric Hamsa Hand Eye Leaves Flower Mandala Dot Border

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she has never once let a story finish without a claw in somebody. Right. You want the one about the hand. Everyone on Skarlos knows the hand. It hangs over the door of every house that has ever had a boat and a bad winter. I will tell you how it came to be painted on the Kalliope, because my grandmother told me, and she was not a liar, only generous with the truth.

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There was a boatbuilder called Yannis Pappas who could carve a keel from a single plank of olive, and a widow across the harbour called Eleni Doukas who could smell a storm three days before the barometer in the café admitted it. They quarrelled for eleven years about the price of nails and the proper way to coil a rope. Nobody thought it would end in marriage, least of all them. But when Yannis's boat went out one morning and did not come back, Eleni was the one who walked to the end of the mole every dawn, scanning the grey water through her late husband's binoculars, until the other women began to say she had the evil eye herself.

So she took her brush and painted a hand on the prow, fingers spread, and at its heart an eye, wide open, so that whatever looked at the boat would find itself looked back at. Then she painted leaves up the fingers, because she said the sea likes things that grow. The Kalliope came home the next week, Yannis swearing a dolphin had towed him in by the belt. Eleni only nodded at the eye and said, "Good. Now you can see what I see."