Small fine line evil eye tattoo with a blue iris and black outline and radiating lashes, on the side of the ribs beside a hand with red nails.

Small evil eye tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A small evil eye tattoo sits on the side of the torso, showing a blue iris inside a black outline with short radiating lashes above. The linework is thin and clean, with the blue used only in the iris, and the rest of the skin is plain. The close crop shows the tattoo beside a lace top, a red skirt and a hand resting on the body.

Fine line Ribs Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint had skinned over in its tin by the time Mrs Halloran passed it to me on the fourth day out of Smyrna, so I cracked the lid with a marlinspike and thinned the blue with a drop of seawater. She ran the galley on the Sadie Brin, a rust-streaked collier bound for Hull with coal in her holds and nobody aboard who trusted luck. "Every boat needs watching," she said, nodding at the lifeboat davits. "Somebody has to keep an eye out."

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I painted the iris first, a slow blue circle the size of a shilling, then the black ring around it, then the lashes, five short strokes fanning up like the spokes of a cart wheel. My hand shook for the first two. Mrs Halloran watched from the hatch with her arms folded and said nothing, which on that ship passed for praise. Nobody aboard knew I had once wanted to draw for a living, or that the drawing I was proudest of was a gull I had never seen in the flesh.

The weather turned off Finisterre and stayed turned. For three nights the boats knocked against their davits and the men below swore at the noise, but the eye on the lifeboat held steady. On the fourth night, Tommy Reece, who had not slept properly since Gibraltar, found me on the fo'c'sle steps and asked whether I had painted one on the inside of the door too. I had not. He said he could not stop feeling that something was facing the bunks.

We made Hull on a grey Tuesday with the coal still in the holds. When the boats were scraped for the next voyage, the men took the paint off the davits with a wire brush and a grumble. I left the small eye on the fo'c'sle door, where it looks in at the bunks and not out at the sea, because Tommy slept through the last two crossings with his face to the wall and I thought he deserved one thing on that ship that was watching over him.