Realism tattoo of a blue eye with a single tear running down the cheek, on a limb with grey shaded skin.

Realistic blue eye with a single tear

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close-up of a realistic eye with a detailed blue and green iris, a dark pupil and a reflective highlight. Fine lash lines, soft grey shading across the lid and a single tear falling below the lower lashes give it a three-dimensional look. Black and grey shading covers the surrounding skin and eyelid, with colour concentrated in the iris.

Realism Other Eye Iris Tear Eyelashes

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 yourself by the copper, lad, and mind the stove, it's temperamental like the Admiralty. You'll not have heard of Jem Crane, who carved for the colliers out of Wapping before the war. He made a figurehead for the Dorothy Vane, a woman with ribbons in her hair and a face so stern the gulls kept clear of her.

Keep reading

The eye was the difficulty. Painted wood looks dead, Jem said, and he would not have it. So he walked to Limehouse to a glassmaker called Mrs Ferris, who had blown lamp chimneys since she was nine and kept a blue in her furnace nobody else could match. It was the blue of the river at slack water, with a thread of green running through it like weed. She set it into the oak herself, and Jem shaded the lid in soft grey so the lashes looked combed that morning.

We went out in October with coal for Gravesend. Off the Nore a squall came down like a dropped curtain, and the boy Ned Parry went over the rail reaching for a loose halyard. I was at the galley door with the potatoes. I saw him go, then saw nothing but grey water and the bowsprit lunging. The skipper cursed the wheel, the mate cursed God, and I cursed the potatoes for being in my hands.

We found Ned at dawn, clinging to a hatch cover three miles down the estuary, blue around the lips and alive. When we tied up at the Pool the crew came down to look at the damage. The figurehead was whole, but a thin dark line ran from her eye down her painted cheek. The glass was wet. On a dry morning, lad, with not a drop of rain since Sunday. I don't ask you to believe it. I only tell you I dried it myself with my apron, and it wept again before I'd finished.