Colour tattoo of a hamsa hand with a blue eye at its centre, dotted borders and teal swirls, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with eye on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hamsa hand design fills the forearm, with a large blue and white eye at its centre and ornate scrolls and filigree around it. Dotted outlines trace the hand's edges, and the upper fingers are shaded in grey. Blue and teal dominate the palette, and the symmetrical composition sits centred on the arm against a dark background.

Dotwork Neo-trad Forearm Hamsa Hand Eye Swirl Ornament Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the band won't be back until the cloakroom man finishes his tea, and that could be an hour yet. You want the story of the blue hand? Everybody in Saltcombe knows the hand painted above the stage, but few know who put the eye in it.

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In the year the Majestic Ballroom flooded to the knees, a girl called Ilse Marrow came up from the docks with a bucket and a tin of blue paint. Her father had sold fish to the hall for thirty years, and she had nothing to her name but a brush and a grudge against the damp. Every night the dancers slipped on the boards, and the bandleader swore the floor was cursed. Ilse climbed the ladder above the proscenium and painted a hand, palm outward, fingers spread like she was stopping a tram. In its centre she drew an eye as big as a dinner plate, lined in white so it looked wet.

The old women from the chapel said the eye would tell the bad from the good. The bandleader said it would sell lemonade. Nobody argued with Ilse, who had a way of looking at a man until he remembered something he needed to do elsewhere. For one summer the floor stayed dry and the dancing went on till the milk carts rattled past at dawn. Then a stranger in a grey coat came asking for the girl, and the caretaker told him she'd gone to sea on the Thessaly and never come back.

Here is the thing about that eye. Stand under it on a quiet night, when the last waltz has gone out of the rafters, and look up. It is still wet. Some nights the blue is brighter than it has any right to be, and the boards beneath it are always dry. Mind your step on the way out. The floor is kinder than it looks.