Close-up of a watercolour-style evil eye tattoo on the side of a ribcage, with a blue brushstroke swirl, teal iris, black pupil and a soft pink halo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour evil eye on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A blue brushstroke swirl curls around a teal iris with a small black centre, forming an evil eye motif. The shading is soft and painterly, with the blue strokes fading into lighter tones, and a pale pink halo surrounds the design on the skin. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso against bare skin, with a dark garment visible at the top of the frame.

Ribs Eye Swirl Brushstroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the stove, the kettle's only lukewarm but it'll do. You want to hear about the Pale Heron, or you wouldn't have come down the towpath in this rain. Forty years I worked the Lesser Wenning on her, and every boat that passed Hobb's Lock had an eye painted on her bow. The old boatmen said the water watches back, and a boat with nothing watching it is a boat with nothing to stop the bad luck getting aboard.

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My uncle Joss couldn't draw a straight line with a rule, but he could lay a stroke. The winter he was sixteen he sat on the cabin roof with a tin of watercolour, thinned with river water because that was all he had, and made one sweep of the brush round in a curl. It came out dark wet blue at the top and thinned to nothing at the bottom, like a wave going out. Inside it he dabbed a teal iris, and at the very middle, one black dot, quick as a sloe. Everyone said the colour would run off in a season. It didn't run. The paint soaked into the hull, and the rust-red primer round it glowed pink in the low sun for years after.

Then came the February the ice broke early and the Heron went onto the sunken weir at Hobb's. We lost the cargo and nearly lost my mother, and when the men came to break her up for scrap they found the eye still on the planking, blue as the day it was painted. The scrap man offered my cousin ten pounds for that one plank. My cousin said no, and that's the plank hanging over your head now, love, so mind your cup.