Black and white linework drawing of a hamsa hand with an eye at its centre, a lotus behind it and dense ornamental patterns across the fingers and palm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with eye and lotus

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black ink drawing of a hamsa hand, with a large eye at the centre of the palm set in front of a lotus-like flower. The fingers and palm are filled with dense, symmetrical patterns of swirls, dots, circles and hatching. The design is entirely in black linework and fine shading on a white background, centred on the page.

Blackwork Hamsa Hand Eye Lotus Ornament Pattern

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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 lamp is nearly spent and the story is longer than the oil. You want to know why the gatekeepers of Hollin Reach carve a hand on their doors. Well. After the drowning years, there was a woman called Maren Oakes who kept the water lock at the mouth of the cistern. Every dawn she walked the channel with a tally stick, counting bloated fish and drowned rope, and every dawn she passed the same thing: the eye.

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It was painted on the inside of the lock gate, a dark round eye set in a white flower, and the hand around it had fingers so crowded with spirals that the children swore they moved when you weren't looking. Nobody knew who had painted it. The old men said the first keepers did it to turn back bad weather. The young men said it was a dock joke that got out of hand.

One night the river rose black and fast and the gate began to groan. Maren went down with a lantern and found the eye weeping, a thin clean line of water running from the pupil. She did not run. She laid her palm flat on the wet wood where the hand was painted and counted the swirls the way her mother had taught her, one loop, then the next, until the pressure eased and the gate settled. By morning the river had dropped a foot.

She never repainted the eye. When they asked her why, she said the lock had only ever needed someone who would look at it long enough to notice it was still there. Mind the step on your way out, and take the lamp. The oil will last you to the gate.