Evil Eye Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a evil eye tattoo means

The belief is older than any of the religions that carry it. The evil eye is harm done by a look — usually envious, often unintentional — and the amulet works by returning the gaze rather than by hiding from it. That is why it is a thing that looks back, and why it is worn where it can be seen.

The distinction people most often miss is between the curse and the charm. The evil eye is the harm; the nazar is the protection against it. A tattoo of the amulet is asking for defence, which is close to the opposite of what the name suggests.

Its geographic reach is enormous and remarkably consistent. From the Mediterranean through Turkey, the Levant, Iran, the Caucasus and into South Asia, the same blue glass disc with a dark centre does the same job, and the design has changed very little in three thousand years.

A cracked bead is the detail that converts the object into a story. The belief is that it breaks once it has absorbed what was aimed at you, so a split nazar is not damaged: it is spent, and that is a far more interesting thing to wear than an intact one.

Where the design comes from

Eye-shaped amulets go back at least to the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia, and the Egyptian Eye of Horus is a related idea from the same period. The blue glass nazar specifically is a Mediterranean and Anatolian form, made by glassblowers in Turkey for centuries and still produced in İzmir; the blue matters because the colour was rare, expensive and associated with warding. Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources all discuss the evil eye directly, which makes it one of very few beliefs shared across all of them. It entered western tattooing largely through the fine-line and small-tattoo boom of the 2010s rather than through any traditional flash lineage, which is why almost all of it is delicate black line or flat blue colour and almost none of it is bold.

Choosing yours

• Draw the amulet, not an eye. Four concentric rings — dark blue, white, pale blue, black centre — are flat and graphic and read instantly; a rendered human eye with lashes reads as an eye, however well drawn, and carries a different and much weaker meaning.
• Blue is doing real work here. In black and grey the concentric rings still identify it, but the colour is a substantial part of what makes a nazar a nazar, and this is one of the few subjects where colour is the traditional choice.
• Consider the object in use. On a red cord, hung from a horseshoe, strung in a row, tied to a tree — the amulet in its setting is much more interesting than the disc alone and is essentially never tattooed.

Common questions