Tattoo of an ornate hamsa hand with a teal eye at its centre, drawn in dotted and patterned detail on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with eye on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A hamsa hand fills the frame, with an ornate pattern of leaves, scrollwork and dotted outlines across the palm and fingers. A teal-green eye sits in the centre of the palm, while the rest of the design is shaded in greys and blue-grey. The tattoo is photographed close up on smooth skin at the side of the torso, with the soft edge of the frame and background darkened.

Dotwork Ribs Hamsa Hand Eye Leaves Mandala Dot Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate hinge had rusted to the colour of dried clay, so Nell Harrow leaned her whole weight against it and swore at the wood until it gave. Behind her the lane smelled of wet hedgerow. Ahead, the walled garden her uncle had kept for forty years was a tangle of bindweed and fig leaves, and in the middle of it, on a stone plinth gone green at the joints, sat the hand.

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It was bigger than she remembered, its fingers spread like a child's drawing of a sun, its palm crowded with scrollwork and leaves picked out in grey and blue-grey paint that had long since started to flake. Set into the centre was an eye, its iris a teal-green glass that caught the light whenever a cloud drifted past. Uncle Ivo had called it the watchman. He had never once explained, only tapped his temple and grinned. Nell knelt and began clearing the ivy from the base, pulling out handfuls of cold roots and dropping them into a bucket that had once held paint.

Tomas from the farm next door leaned on the wall at noon. "The agent's coming Thursday," he said. "Says the land's worth more with the walls down." Nell sat back on her heels. "Tell him the watchman has a say." Tomas laughed, then stopped, because the eye seemed to be looking straight at him over her shoulder. "It's only glass," he said. "Only glass," she agreed, and found she had turned the hand a quarter turn so the eye faced the gate.

That evening she sat on the step with a flask of tea and watched the lane. A van slowed, saw the open gateway, and drove on without stopping. Nell left the gate standing wide and went inside, but she did not close the shutters on the garden side. The watchman kept his eye on the road, and so, for the first time in years, did she.