Black ink linework drawing of a hamsa hand with a detailed eye at its centre, surrounded by roses, leaves and two swallows, on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with eye, roses and swallows

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn tattoo design on paper showing a hamsa hand with a shaded eye in its centre, ornamental patterning on the palm, and two roses with leaves below. Two swallows sit at the top left and lower right, with a bird and additional leaves framing the composition. The image is black ink linework with no colour, with fine hatching and dotted detail in the eye and palm.

Botanical Hamsa Hand Eye Rose Leaves Swallow Bird Mandala

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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 lot of you, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the good oil. Your great-grandmother's great-grandmother used to say the sea was the only thing that never forgot a ship. She was wrong about that, but she was right about the hand.

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The hand came up out of the Mersey mud in the year the old dome over Liverpool finally cracked, turned up by a welder called Ines Okafor-Hale who was mending the gate of the ferry dock. It was no bigger than a child's palm, cast in some grey metal nobody could name, and in its centre sat a single eye, open, pale as a wet stone. Ines carried it home to the lighthouse on Crosby sands because the lighthouse had the only dry room left. She set it on the windowsill facing the river and went back to work.

Every morning after that, the swallows came. Nobody ever saw them land. They were simply there on the sill, two of them, then a third bird with its feathers tangled like wire, and roses that someone had painted on the glass in a colour nobody could mix any more. The town called it a sign. Ines called it a draught.

On the night the tide came in backwards and the boats were dragged out past the buoys, the eye turned to the water and did not blink. Ines swore the men in the lifeboat looked up at that window and steered by it. They came home. Ever after, the hand stayed on the sill and the old folk called it the lookout, and nobody ever again tried to move it.