Black and grey realism tattoo of a large eye with dripping tears and skulls across a shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic eye and skulls across back and shoulder

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic eye with a dripping tear and a few blood-like red streaks sits at the centre of a dark, detailed design. Skulls and a partly visible human face are shaded in soft greys and deep blacks around the eye, with a torn-skin effect along the upper edge. Smooth gradients and high contrast dominate the composition, which fills the frame across the shoulder and upper back.

Realism Back Shoulder Eye Skull Face Tear Blood Skin

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

Dear Marta, the lorry from Vilnius came through at ten past three, and the driver had no papers for the crate, only a brass key and a note saying the eye was not to be opened until it had stopped weeping. I have kept it in the back office under a tarpaulin for four nights now. The damp on the wall above it has shaped itself into a skull, and every morning the stain is a little larger.

Keep reading

Yesterday Inspector Halvorsen wanted it burned. He pulled back the tarpaulin and the eye looked straight at him, grey as a winter pond, and a bead of water ran down the lid and dropped onto the desk. Where it struck the wood, a small red mark bloomed like a thumbprint in wine. Halvorsen laughed, then stopped laughing, then went out to the car park and sat in his vehicle with the engine off until dusk.

I have started to count the tears. Eleven so far. Each one lands on a different surface, and each surface, I swear, grows the same bone-pale lichen the crate was lined with. The driver has not come back for it. The manifest says the consignee is a widow in Kraków who died in 1962, and the seal on the crate is older than the checkpoint itself.

I am writing this so that someone knows where it came from if I am found in the morning with my cheek against the glass. Tonight I will leave the lamp on. It seems to like the light.