Realistic tattoo of a teal eye set within dark, textured scaly skin on a forearm, with a red lower lid line and blue accents.

Realistic eye within textured skin on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic eye with a teal iris and dark pupil sits at the centre of the design, with a red line along the lower lid. It is surrounded by dark, ridged, scale-like texture that fades into teal and blue shading at the edges. The tattoo covers most of a forearm, photographed against a wooden table and a cardboard box.

Realism Forearm Eye Iris Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mate swore the thing had been keeping pace with the Morwenna for nine days, a long way off the bow and never once behind it. Nobody believed him until the cook, Tamsin Rowe, stood at the rail at first light and saw it too. A single eye broke the grey water, ringed with a hide like old oak bark, ridged and dark, and the iris was the teal of shallow water over sand. Its lower lid was rimmed in red.

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Tamsin did not run and did not shout. Her grandmother had told her the sea keeps a tally of every ship that crosses it and every lie told on board. The creature only watched, and when the watch was done it sank. Tamsin went back to her pots and said nothing for a day, then took a tin of salt pork and a heel of bread to the stern and set them on the rail, as her grandmother had done for the harbour seals at Newlyn.

That night the eye came back closer than ever, nearly level with the lantern. Tamsin spoke to it plainly, the way one speaks to a neighbour's bad-tempered dog. She told it the mate had watered the casks, that the boy Ned had stolen the brandy, and that she had cheated at cards in Penzance. She said it was all true and she did not expect forgiveness. The eye blinked slowly, its red lid drawing down over the teal, and it turned away south.

They made port at dawn with full casks and an empty brandy bottle. The mate paid Ned his share and the boy wept into his cap, and nobody asked why. Tamsin never told the tale to a stranger, but she kept the salt tin on the rail every voyage after, and the Morwenna's crew were never again becalmed in the long swell off the Scillies.