Traditional style tattoo of a dark hand with a red eye, orange flames, a tower and a banner reading In the Eye of the Beholder, on an upper arm.

Hand and eye with flames on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A dark hand with its palm facing outward sits at the centre of the design, with a red eye with a drop beneath it on the palm and orange and yellow flames rising from the fingers. A small tower sits to the right, and a red banner curls across the base of the hand bearing the words IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER. Bold black outlines and grey shading give the hand volume, while the flames, eye and banner carry the colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell held his hand up in the fog like a man stopping traffic, and the whole deck went quiet. We had four lamps astern and none ahead, and the herring were running under us somewhere in the grey. Old Mossy swore the tower at Corton had gone dark the week before, but Pell only said the fleet would find us if we kept our mouths shut and our lamps trimmed.

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Pell's hand was the one thing on the boat he never let us tar or lash. The ink ran from knuckle to wrist, a flame going up each finger and, in the middle of the palm, an eye with a single red drop beneath it. He'd had it done in Genoa when he was nineteen, and he claimed the eye watched whatever the palm pointed at. I thought it was nonsense until the wheelhouse glass fogged over and that red eye seemed to find me across the deck.

At four bells he lit the paraffin in the binnacle, and the flames of his fingers flickered in the lamplight. Then came a bell somewhere to starboard and a squared shape stood up out of the murk, a tower with its top broken like a bad tooth. 'Beholder,' Pell said, and laughed, the first time I'd heard him laugh all trip. We steered for it, and Mossy wept openly against the rail.

Ashore that morning I asked Pell how the eye managed in thick weather. He closed his hand over the palm, slow, and said the tower had been lit the whole time. We had simply been looking at the wrong part of the sea.

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