Pen drawing of a hamsa hand filled with mandala and paisley patterns and an open eye at its centre, drawn on paper with a black pen.

Hamsa hand with eye design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pen sketch of a hamsa hand, with five fingers decorated by leaf-like flourishes and a large eye set in the palm. The palm is surrounded by floral mandala motifs and paisley shapes, with the outline drawn in dark ink and fine hatched and dotted detail. The drawing sits centred on a sheet of cream paper, with a black pen lying diagonally across the lower left.

Hamsa Hand Eye Mandala Floral Paisley Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in sideways off the estuary, and Nuala Pike was still counting coins under the awning when the woman with the blue pen case stopped at her trestle. She didn't buy anything. She turned over the sheet of paper Nuala kept pinned to the board, the one with the hand drawn on it, and ran a finger along the leaves that curled out from the fingers like something growing up a wall.

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That hand had been Nuala's mother's idea, though her mother had never drawn a line in her life. She had seen one painted on a bus shelter in Lisbon and talked about it for twenty years, the open palm that keeps off bad luck, and when she died Nuala found a scrap of brown paper in the tin with the words hand and eye written on it in pencil, nothing else. So Nuala drew it. She filled the palm with the circle of flowers and the teardrop shapes her own grandmother used to stitch onto tea towels, and she put the eye in the middle, because that was the part her mother had underlined twice.

"Is it for sale?" the woman asked.

"Everything on this board is for sale," Nuala said. "Not the eye, though. The eye stays where it is."

The woman laughed, folded the sheet with the care of someone handling a letter, and set it back on the board face up. Then she tucked a coin into the jar, a worn old penny nobody had used since decimal, and walked off into the rain with the pen case under her arm. Nuala looked at the empty space where the paper had been and found she was smiling, which surprised her more than anything the day had done.