Close-up of a small black blackwork and dotwork tattoo of an ornamental paisley shape with an eye motif, placed centrally on the chest below the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental eye and droplet tattoo on the sternum

Blackwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small black ornamental tattoo sits centrally on the chest. It shows a teardrop-shaped motif with a dotted eye at the top, concentric dots and lines inside, scalloped filigree edges, and a single droplet hanging from the base. The linework is solid and the dotwork detail is crisp against pale skin. A hand holds a dark fabric open at the sides, with a thin chain visible at the top of the frame.

Blackwork Dotwork Chest Ornament Paisley Eye Droplet Mandala Filigree Dot

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

Sit down, the next train isn't due for an hour, and I've told this one only to the pigeons. You want to know why the clock on platform four stops at twenty to three every night? Because of the lamp in the lost property cupboard, the one with the brass eye. Old Ansel Vane made it for the signal box at Hollin Junction the winter the fog came down so thick the guards walked in front of the engines with handkerchiefs on sticks.

Keep reading

He built it like a teardrop of cut glass, filled with paraffin, with a brass eye set at the top so the signalwoman could see the lamp's own reflection and know it was lit. Round the edge he hammered a lace of little scallops, and at the bottom he hung one bead of glass on a wire. Every evening Ansel polished the lens, and every evening that bead caught the lamplight and held it a moment before it fell into the tin tray below. Plink. The signalwoman, Sarah Tulloch, counted those drops through the long nights. Her husband had gone under a goods wagon in the frost, and she said the sound was the only honest clock left on the line.

When Ansel died, nobody could bear to sell the lamp, so it went into the cupboard with the umbrellas and the wrong-coloured gloves. Nobody oils it. Nobody fills it. But at twenty to three, when the house is quiet and the rails are cold, you can still hear that bead strike the tray, plink, as if someone is keeping count. Put your ear to the cupboard door. Go on. That's the last train waiting for its signal, and it always gets home.