Two matching traditional eye tattoos in black, grey, red and orange on the tops of a pair of bare feet with painted toenails.

Matching traditional eye tattoos on both feet

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

Two matching eye designs sit on the tops of bare feet, each with a black pupil, a grey iris band, black lashes and a scalloped ornamental edge. Bold black outlines and a stippled dot pattern on the lower lid define the linework, with grey shading for depth. Red, orange and yellow accents against the black and grey give the pair a strong, saturated look on pale skin.

Traditional Other Eye Eyelashes Ornament Scallop Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Somebody had painted an eye on the stairwell wall at Hollis Point, and by the time I found it the paint was still tacky under my thumb. Fourteen floors up, between the recycling bins and the fire door that never shut properly, a red-rimmed eye stared down at the landing with lashes like the bars of a cell. Nobody on the council payroll had asked for it, and nobody on the fourteenth floor would own up to it.

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I went round the block with a bucket of white emulsion before the morning shift, meaning to paint it out. Mrs Adeyemi from eleven stopped me at the lifts with her shopping trolley. "Leave it be, Mr Patel. It's the Vane girl's." Tilly Vane was nineteen and living with her gran since the flat above the chippy flooded. She had been drawing eyes in biro on the backs of takeaway menus since she was small, she told me, because her dad used to say an eye on the wall stops a thief thinking about the lock.

That night I sat on the step below the eye with a flask and didn't go home. The lift groaned and stopped at seven, and I heard somebody climbing, slow and patient, one flight at a time. It was Tilly, with a pot of ochre and a brush wrapped in a carrier bag. She didn't look surprised to see me. She knelt on the concrete and added a thin yellow ring to the iris, dotting it the way you'd dot a pattern on a cake.

"It isn't for watching you," she said. "It's so the building knows somebody's up."

I left the emulsion in its bucket by the bins. In the morning the lift worked first time, and when I passed the fourteenth floor the eye looked back at me, awake and steady, as if it had been keeping watch all along.