Black ink drawing of a hamsa hand with an eye set in a lotus flower and dense ornamental patterning, shown over a photo of clear water.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with eye and lotus design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed line drawing of a hamsa hand, with an eye inside a lotus flower at the centre of the palm. The fingers and palm are filled with dense, symmetrical ornamental patterns of swirls, dots and curved motifs. The black linework sits over a photograph of shallow water and stones, which forms the background.

Hamsa Hand Eye Lotus Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn to listen for water before you learn to read. In Hollin Bank the old drift flooded the winter the roof gave way, and now the whole village hears it: a tick in the pipes, a shiver under the floorboards, the pumps grinding through the night like a dog that will not settle. Your mother keeps the hamsa on a nail above the back door, the brass hand her own mother carried over from the coast, its palm worked all over with curls and dots and a blue eye sitting in a lotus. She says the eye watches the water so the men don't have to.

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Your father works the number two pump. On the night the thaw came early, the shift whistle sounds and he does not come up with the others. You take the hand down off its nail and walk the track to the flooded edge, where the shallows are clear enough to see the stones on the bottom and the pit boys' boot prints still pressed into the silt. The water is cold enough to ache. You hold the hand under the surface and watch the patterns wobble and shine, the eye staying perfectly still while everything around it moves.

A lamp swings in the drift mouth. Then the pump stops, and the silence is so sudden you feel it in your teeth. The men come up one at a time, grey with dust, counting each other off by name. Your father comes last, carrying his lamp in one hand and a length of rope in the other. He says the water found the old timber and held there, and that the boys were sensible enough to go round by the east gate.

You carry the hand home dripping. Your mother takes it from you without a word and hangs it back on its nail, and a single drop runs down the brass and lands on the sill, where it sits for a while before it finally dries.