Realistic colour tattoo of a yellow-green reptile eye with a slit pupil and scaly skin on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Reptile eye and scales on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large reptile eye with a yellow-green iris and vertical slit pupil sits at the centre of the forearm, surrounded by textured, scaly skin. Smooth grey shading gives the skin folds and ridges a three-dimensional look, and a second, smaller eye-like form appears lower down near the wrist. Colour is used for the iris, while the surrounding skin is rendered in black and grey tones against a dark purple background.

Realism Forearm Reptile Eye Scale Iris

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had gone out past the ledge at Skerrow, leaving the rock pools full of light, and I was up to my knees in them when the eye opened under the weed.

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Everyone on the island knew about the thing in the old slate quarry, though nobody admitted to having seen it. Grandad said it was a lizard that had crawled off a cargo boat in 1911 and grown fat on gulls. Its scales were the grey of wet slate and its lid came down sideways like a shutter. I had never believed him until I looked down into the quarry water that afternoon and the eye was looking up at me, yellow as the lamp in our back window, with a slit down the middle that narrowed when I blinked.

I should have run. Instead I sat on the edge with my bucket and we regarded each other for what might have been a minute or an hour. Then it did something I did not expect. It shut the lid, slowly, and a second eye, smaller and older, opened in the ridged skin lower down by the waterline. I understood it was showing me the way to the cave where the sea came in.

I told nobody that night. Grandad went quiet when I described it, and the next morning he left a pair of my mother's old gloves on the step with a note in his square capitals: KEEP YOUR HANDS OUT OF THE QUARRY. SOME THINGS LEND YOU THEIR EYES AND WANT THEM BACK. I wore those gloves to school for a year, and every low tide since, I have kept one eye on the water for him.