Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a hamsa hand framing an eye, a swallow, cherry blossoms and a rose, placed on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with eye, swallow and blossoms

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A hamsa hand outlined in gold frames an eye at its centre, surrounded by a swallow, pink cherry blossoms, a red rose, a blue fish and scrolling waves. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth colour fills in teal, blue, pink, orange and yellow. The design fills the frame, shown on a section of upper leg with skin visible at the edges.

Neo-trad Thigh Hamsa Eye Swallow Cherry blossom Rose Fish Wave Flower

Find an artist for this

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

The hand over our door at Hollin's Edge was older than the church roof, a gold-rimmed palm painted on a board that my grandmother recoated every spring with linseed and a borrowed brush. Inside it sat an eye, brown as wet bark. She said it was there to watch the wood so the wood would not watch us, and I was nine before I understood she meant the trees.

Keep reading

Beyond the last cottage the forest began, its cherry trees pink in April and drifting onto the stream where a blue-backed fish waited in the shallows for crumbs. Every year a swallow built under our eaves, and every year it flew out over the blossom and came home with red mud on its breast. I thought the birds and the flowers were the hand's doing, that the eye kept everything tidy the way Gran kept her hedges.

The summer I turned seventeen I went into the trees after Tom Hallows's dog and did not come out until dusk, my boots full of water and my voice gone hoarse from calling. I found the path again by following a swallow low over the bracken, and by the time I reached the gate the painted hand had gone dark against the wall. Gran was waiting with the brush in her fist. She had added a fresh ring of teal waves around the eye while I was gone, as if she had been counting the minutes.

I never went far after that. I have a hand over my own door now, and each spring I repaint the waves and the rose, and each spring a swallow returns to the same eave to see whether I have finished.