Small black fine line hamsa hand tattoo with an eye motif sitting behind a person's ear, shown in close up.

Small hamsa hand behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small hamsa hand tattoo in black ink sits behind the ear on the side of the head. The outline is clean and the palm is filled with ornamental scrollwork, with a single eye at its centre. The image is a close, softly lit photograph in black and grey tones, with the subject's hair and ear framing the design.

Fine line Other Hamsa Hand Eye Ornament Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, because this is the bit where the wind turns. Eighteen sixty-one, the Marigold out of Penzance, three months south with a hold full of tin and a cook called Dafydd Rees who would not let a man near the biscuit barrel without a witness. He had a silver hand on a cord round his neck, no bigger than a walnut, hammered by a man in Bristol who did filigree for the Levant trade. Every whorl on its palm was cut with a fine chisel, and in the middle of it all sat one small eye, looking out, the way a lookout does.

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Out past the Cape Verdes the water went flat as pewter, and the men began to whisper that the cook had been dipping the flour. Dafydd said nothing. He only held the hand up to the moon each night and muttered something the boys could not catch. Then the fever came down into the forecastle, and the mate, a man called Stroud, went below to find who had been stealing the rum. He found Dafydd sitting on a crate with his thumb pressed to the silver, and the eye on the palm was looking straight at him.

Stroud swore the eye had moved. Dafydd laughed and said it only ever looked at whoever was lying. Stroud went up on deck with his face white, confessed to the rum in front of the captain, and the fever broke with the next watch, as fevers do when people finally stop pretending. Dafydd never told anyone whether the eye was real, only that it had a long memory.

He kept that charm on its cord until the day he died in Hull, and the last thing they say he did was turn it to the wall, so that the eye could look in at him for once.