Photograph of a realistic colour tattoo of an open eye with a red iris and three dark markings, on the forearm, in Realism style.

Realistic red eye on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large, open eye fills the frame, with a red iris carrying three dark markings and fine black eyelashes along the upper and lower lids. The shading is soft and smooth, with blended browns and reds around the lids and a fine highlight on the eye, giving a lifelike, three-dimensional look. The tattoo sits on an arm with a darker sleeve tattoo visible at the top edge of the frame.

Realism Forearm Eye Iris Eyelashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Stoke Lane had warned me about the eel that lived under the Mary Ellen, but nobody had warned me about the eye. I was on the back deck at a quarter to three, kettle gone cold in my hands, when the black water beside the hull went still and something turned up through it. A red iris, dark as wet brick, with three slow markings circling the pupil like the hands of a clock that had lost its face.

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My father used to say the canal kept its own accounts. Every lock you worked, every bargee who went under without a shout, the water wrote it down and kept the ledger somewhere below the towpath. He never said what happened when the ledger was read back. I stood very still and looked at the eye, and the eye, with its long black lashes lying across the surface like reeds, looked back at me with the patience of something that had all night.

I could have run for the bank. Instead I did the stupid thing, the thing my father would have clipped me for. I set the kettle on the rail, crouched down, and said, out loud, the name of every boat that had ever moored at Stoke Lane. The Constance. The Dove. The Bright Adeline, which sank in the frost of 1947 with a cargo of coal and a cat. At the Adeline the lashes lowered slowly, like a shutter coming down on a shop.

The water went ordinary after that, brown and sour and full of chip packets. I still don't know whether I was forgiven or simply released. In the morning the kettle was full and the gas was lit, and nobody on the towpath would say who had filled it.