Black and grey realistic eye tattoo with three flies on a limb, shown against a dark background.

Realistic eye tattoo with flies

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large, detailed eye fills the centre of the image, with long lashes, a shaded lid and a reflective iris. Three flies are placed around the eye, two of them small and one larger near the lower edge. The work is entirely in black and grey, with soft shading that gives the eye a three-dimensional look against the skin.

Realism Other Eye Iris Eyelashes Insect

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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

Right, settle down, the band can wait, the fiddler's only having a sip. You want the story of Mr Pell's eye, so listen close. Pell kept the Ferrars Ballroom above the pier in the summer of 1931, and under the bar he kept a tin box with a glass eye in it, won off a drowned sailor's chest in a card game nobody remembered losing. It was grey and very clear, with a black pupil like the mouth of a well, and it never once shut.

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Pell hung it in the cloakroom so the girls could check their stockings in it. Nobody likes to be watched while they powder their nose, so nobody liked the cloakroom, and the dances got thin. Then the flies came. Big summer flies off the harbour, dozens of them, settling on the glass and walking the lashes somebody had painted on the lid. Pell swatted and swatted. By August he couldn't sweep the floor without sweeping up wings.

One night a girl called Nell Haskett went in to fix her hair and saw the pupil had gone wide and wet. In the shine of it there was no reflection of her at all, only the whole hall, every dancer frozen mid-step, and the flies circling them slow as the hands of a clock. She laughed and said it was the gaslight. But she stood there long enough to notice the flies only ever landed on the eye when somebody near it told a lie.

Pell carried the eye to the end of the pier the next morning and let it go. The flies went down after it, every last one, and the sea closed over them like a lid. Mind your hems on the way out, and if you ever see a fly settle on a looking glass, don't you dare swat it.