Close view of a tattooed hand holding a paper stencil on a thigh, with a black and grey rose on the hand and a brain and cloud design on the leg.

Black and grey hand and thigh tattoos

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A seated person in black clothing holds a paper stencil against a hairy thigh. The hand shows a black line rose and small filled shapes on the fingers, while the leg has a brain, the word MOM, an oval, and a large cloud-like outline near the knee. The linework is bold and sketchy, with solid black fills, and the image is lit by a warm flash against a black leather sofa.

Hand Thigh Rose Brain Cloud Oval Mom Stencil Sun Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The napkin had a brain drawn on it in biro, a cloud sitting on a hill, and an oval with a line through the middle like a pill somebody had decided not to take. Underneath, in capitals pressed so hard the paper had torn, someone had written MOM. The lad who slid it across my counter at Kirkgate said he couldn't draw, which I could see for myself, and that he needed it on a stencil by Friday.

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My mother ran this stall before me, and her rule was never to cut a design you hadn't been given the reason for. So I asked him what the cloud was. He said it was the weather the week his nan moved out of the house on Harrogate Road, and that she'd sat in the back of the van with a plant on her knee the whole way and never once looked out. I asked about the oval. He said that was the Tuesday she rang from the new flat to say she'd got the hob working. I didn't ask about the brain. He told me anyway: it was the bit of her that kept remembering things she'd been told not to.

I traced the napkin onto carbon paper, then onto the good card, and cut the stencil with a scalpel while the radio played the shipping forecast in the background. When I came to the word MOM I cut it out entirely, so the letters were empty spaces and the skin would show through them. I held it up to the strip light. Reversed, the letters read WOM, which was no use to anyone.

He took it from me and laughed, the first proper laugh he'd given all morning. "She'll read it right from the other side," he said, and folded it into his jacket pocket.