Two hands held together against a black background, with thin black bands tattooed around several fingers and solid black ink on the tips of some nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black finger bands and nail tips on two hands

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are photographed palm down against a plain black background. Several fingers carry thin, solid black bands wrapped around them, and some nails appear coated in solid black ink. The ink is crisp and graphic with no shading, and the image is entirely black and grey, with the hands framed centrally.

Geometric Hand Band Ring Line Nail Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The white line runs out a few miles past Salt Wren Junction, and after that you steer by the fence posts, never by the shimmer on the horizon, which will happily tell you there is a lake out there. Count the posts. Forty to a mile, if the wind hasn't taken any.

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Dell had pressed a tin of black lacquer into your palm at the petrol pump that morning, along with a coil of baling wire he'd twisted into two plain rings. Hold still, he said, and painted the tip of each nail in one quick, flat stroke, then wound the wire round two of your fingers and pinched it shut with his pliers. Something to hold onto when the road gets thin. Don't take them off until you're past the cattle grid.

The car gives up at dusk, its bonnet ticking like a clock as it cools. You walk with the stars coming out one by one, and the wire bites a little whenever you grip the strap of your bag. At each post you touch a band with your thumb and say the number aloud, because talking keeps the silence from getting ideas. Past the hundredth post the cattle grid appears, rusted and tinny under your boots, and you stand on it for a while, unsure whether you are meant to cross or simply to stop.

You cross it, and you take the wire off. Beyond it, a tin roof leans over a water tank, and on the ledge someone has left a jam jar of coins and a pencil. You leave one ring beside the coins for the road and keep the other in your pocket for the walk back. By the time the sun clears the ridge, the lacquer has dried flat and black along every nail, and the posts stand in a line behind you, all of them counted.