Black and grey traditional tattoo of a hand gripping a straight razor with eye motifs on the blade, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding a straight razor with eyes

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A hand grips the handle of a straight razor, and the blade carries two eye designs with a drip at its tip. The design uses bold, solid outlines with hatched shading on the fingers and blade edges. It is shown in black ink on a calf against a dark background.

Traditional Calf Hand Eye Blade Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had shaved the captain every morning for nineteen years, and in all that time the old man had never once looked at the blade. He looked at the sea through the porthole, or at the ceiling, or at the ship's boy hanging in the rigging beyond the glass. The razor was ground in Hull and had belonged to Tomas's father, and it had two eyes stamped on its spine that the captain swore were the brass maker's joke, not his.

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Somewhere past the Azores the water went flat for eleven days. The water casks turned green, the biscuit grew a grey fur, and the men began to say the eyes on the blade had moved. Tomas told them it was the swell. He kept the steel oiled and the strop hung dry, and he said nothing when the captain began asking him, very quietly, whether the thing would cut a rope.

On the twelfth morning the captain sat down in the chair, tipped his head back, and told Tomas to finish the job. The blade went up under his jaw and stopped. A single drop gathered at its point, dark as ink, and fell onto the captain's collar. Tomas found he could not lift his hand away.

The mate wrote in the log that noon that the wind had come back from the south-west. The captain was found on the foredeck, shaved clean, smiling at the sky. Tomas kept the razor, and he never again let a man sit in the chair without first asking the eyes what they wanted.