Black and grey realism tattoo of an eye with long lashes and a large letter N on a person's upper back and shoulder, with lettering beside it.

Realistic eye with large N on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic eye with long lashes sits on the upper back and shoulder blade, rendered in soft grey shading with dark, loose splatters and drips around it. A large white-edged letter N sits to the right, with the words "ever Look Back" in a typewriter-style font running down beside it. The work is entirely black and grey and fills the frame from the shoulder across the back.

Realism Shoulder Back Eye Eyelashes Lettering Splatter Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every boat in Skerrow carried the same rule painted on its transom: ever look back, and the words were never to be read aloud on the water. Nobody knew who had first lettered it, only that the old sea wall above the slip had an eye set into it, dark and wet and lashed like a ewe's, and that the eye opened when the fleet cleared the Gannet Rock. Maren's grandfather had seen it open once and kept his head forward for the next fifty years.

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The autumn her son Tobiah went out as master for the first time, the glass fell fast and the men were jumpy. Half a mile past the rock, the boy heard his mother call his name from the slip, the way she used to call him in for supper when he was small. His neck wanted to turn. He thought of the big N cut into the tiller, the one his father had said meant north and nothing else, and he kept his eyes on the bow.

Behind them the wind got up and the sea went grey as slate. In the next boat, Davey Crane could not help himself and twisted round in his seat. The fleet heard nothing, but Davey came home that night with his hair gone white at the temples and would not say what he had seen, only that the eye on the wall had been weeping ink down the stones, and that it had been looking at him and not at the sea.

Tobiah brought his boat in at dusk with a full hold. His mother was waiting on the slip. She asked him nothing. She lifted a net from the basket and began to mend the tear in it, and when he finally looked back at the wall, the eye had closed and the dark runs on the stone had dried like rain that had never fallen.