Pencil line drawing of a winged eye inside a triangle with rays, scrollwork and two roses, designed as a neo-traditional style tattoo.

Winged eye in triangle with roses

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of an open eye set inside a triangle, with feathered wings spreading out on either side and radiating lines above. Two detailed roses with curled petals and leaves sit beneath the eye, framed by ornamental scrollwork. The linework is fine and fairly even in dark graphite on pale paper, with no shading or colour.

Neo-trad Eye Wing Rose Triangle Ray Scrollwork Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Crane had been told twice by Mr Hallett to stop drawing eyes in the margins of the invoices. "Nobody pays for a thing that's watching them," Hallett said, tapping the ledger with a yellowed nail, "and nobody pays for roses that look like they've been left out in the rain." So on the Friday before the regatta, Tobias sat at the back of the print shop in Leith with a 2B pencil worn down to a stub and drew the thing anyway, because the captain of the Marguerite had asked for it in person and paid in advance.

Keep reading

He ruled the triangle first, using the edge of a sign-writer's rule, then drew the eye, which came out wrong three times before he let it be. Wings were easy. The roses took the whole afternoon. He curled the petals back like the ruffled collars in old photographs and scrolled the ornament round until the paper smelled of rubber and graphite. The rays came last, fanning out from the top of the triangle, fine as hair, and when he lifted his hand the eye seemed to look up at him as if it had been waiting for someone to switch on the light.

The captain collected the drawing at six, folded it once, and did not unfold it again. "Hallett says you've a gift," he said. "Pity about the eye." Tobias asked what he meant, but the captain only tucked the paper inside his oilskin and nodded at the window, where the harbour lamps were coming on one by one across the water.

That night Tobias found a fresh sheet on the bench, blank, with the pencil laid neatly beside it. He had no memory of taking it out. He sharpened the stub with his knife, and before he could think better of it he began the roses again, leaving the eye out, and watched the petals curl and the scrollwork close around nothing at all.