Black and grey realistic tattoo of an eye with long lashes and an intricate iris pattern, with 'Never Give Up' in script above it, on the upper arm.

Realistic eye with Never Give Up script

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic eye sits on the upper arm, with long lashes curving over the top and a feather-like shape shaded beneath it. The iris carries a detailed pattern, and the eye is rendered with soft grey shading and sharp highlights. The script lettering 'Never Give Up' follows the curve of the arm above the eye, and the image is a close, angled view in black and grey ink.

Realism Lettering Upper arm Eye Eyelashes Feather Script Lettering

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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

Sit closer, the fire's only good for another hour and the road doesn't care how cold you are. You want the one about the water tanker on the Ninety Mile. Everyone out there knows it, though they tell it wrong.

Keep reading

Dorothy Vell drove the water truck for the mine camps, and she drove it the year the rains forgot us. The tanker had two words painted on its door in red letters that had mostly peeled away, and a grandson had scratched the rest back in with a nail. Nobody asked her what they meant. Past the last windmill there was a grey feather lying on the tarmac, long and clean, and she stopped the truck for it, because a feather that far from any bird is a message, whatever the preacher says.

The hawk came down off a telegraph pole that afternoon and sat on the bonnet, watching her through the windscreen with an eye like a struck coin. She said later that it looked at her the way the noon sun does, flat and unwilling to be looked back at. She drove the last forty miles with it watching her and never once did it blink, and that is how she knew the water would reach the camp. A thing that patient doesn't miss its mark.

Now here is the turn, and you'll want to remember it when you're tired. The hawk lifted off at the cattle grid. The feather stayed tucked in her cap. At the camp they were three days from losing the pumps, and she unloaded forty drums into the dust with the sun on her neck. When they asked how she'd kept going, she only tapped the cap and said the bird had done the seeing, she'd just kept the road.

Mind the fire now. That's all of it.