Black and grey realism tattoo of an eye with a reflected pier and a tear running down the cheek, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic eye with a tear on the upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic eye fills the frame, with detailed lashes, a shaded lid and a glossy tear running down below the lower lid. The pupil contains a reflection of a wooden pier with railings and a few figures against a pale sky. The work uses smooth black and grey shading with strong contrast and high detail, and the photo shows it on an upper arm beside a striped top and a brick wall.

Realism Upper arm Eye Tear Reflection Eyelashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the draught from the door, because the Winter Gardens never kept its heat once the band packed up. You want the tale of Dolly Marr and the man in the borrowed suit. Everybody on this coast knows the pier. Nobody knows what it saw.

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Dolly ran the ballroom at the end of Harrow Pier from 1931 until the sea took the boards in the big storm. Every Saturday she stood by the rail with a tin of cigarettes, watching the dancers through the glass, and when the lamps came down she walked the boardwalk to count the railings. Forty-two of them, she used to say, each one a promise somebody made and didn't keep.

The stranger arrived on a Saturday in September. He never danced. He stood at the rail where she stood and watched the water until the tide turned and the moon hung in it like a coin at the bottom of a well. Dolly asked him what he was waiting for. He said he was waiting for the sea to give something back. She told him the sea had never given her a thing, and she'd been fishing for it twenty years.

He left before the last waltz, and when she went to close up she found a wet mark on the rail, bright as a drop of mercury. She leaned over and saw the whole pier turned upside down in the still water, every railing, every lamp, and a small woman at the end of it looking back. That was when Dolly understood the man had never been waiting on the sea. He had been waiting for someone to look at the pier long enough to see it.