Close view of a torso in white lace lingerie with traditional style tattoos, including a teal eye in a heart on the upper stomach and a bird on the side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional tattoos on a torso, arms and thighs

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A close crop of a torso in white lace lingerie with a navel piercing, showing several traditional style tattoos across the stomach, side, arms and thigh. The teal heart-shaped eye sits on the upper abdomen, a dark bird with red and yellow detail sits on the side, and a multicoloured mandala motif lies below the navel. Bold outlines and flat colour fills dominate, with some black shading and a pin-up style figure on the thigh.

Traditional Chest Ribs Upper arm Forearm Thigh Eye Heart Bird Mandala Pin-up Arrow Flower Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, love, the kettle's only just gone on, and I'll tell you about the eye that kept watch over the Brackenfield night ward. You'll not find it on any plan. It was painted on the inside of a supply cupboard door in 1956 by a sister called Ada Penhale, who said a ward at three in the morning needed something that never blinked.

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Ada had a teal the colour of a swimming pool and a heart shape she'd copied off a Valentine's card, and she ringed the eye in black like a fisherman's knot. Above the cupboard she hung a little dark bird on a wire, red at the throat and yellow at the wing. Ada swore it was a jackdaw, though I always say swallow, and it sang whenever the lift doors opened. Nobody slept properly on that ward. Nobody needed to.

The winter the boiler failed, a boy of nine came in with a broken wrist and wouldn't let go of the bird's wire. He asked Ada who the eye was watching for. She said for whoever was still awake. He said then it must be watching her, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor tiles, right under the blue and cream rosette painted there, and the eye, I swear, went a shade softer.

When the ward was finally quiet I'd come up at six and find the cupboard door shut and the bird silent on its wire. Ada retired in '71 and took her eye with her, or so the story goes. Some mornings I still feel it on the back of my neck, steady as a lamp left burning for someone who isn't coming back, and I make the tea a little slower for it.