Close photo of a hand with a bold black tribal blackwork tattoo of chevrons, hexagons and bands covering the back of the hand, fingers and wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blackwork tribal pattern across the hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a hand and part of the wrist covered in a dense black tattoo of tribal-style geometric bands, chevrons and hexagonal cells. The bold, solid black linework and fills contrast with the lighter skin between the shapes, and the pattern wraps over the knuckles and along each finger. The image is in black and grey and is shot at an angle, with the fingers in the foreground and the forearm fading out at the top.

Blackwork Geometric Hand Forearm Tribal pattern Chevron Hexagon Hand Finger Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock at Sallow Cut had been stuck since March, and Nell Ardery spent the first hour of the tow cursing the gate and the hour after that learning the bargemen's trick of reading water by its colour. Brown meant deep. Green with a skin of foam meant the weir was talking. She stood on the back deck of the Hesper with her palms flat on the tiller, feeling the chevrons of current push up through the wood, each one leaning a little harder than the last.

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Her grandfather had painted the hull in the old way, bands of black around the bow and hexagons along the gunwale, cells packed tight like honeycomb. He had told her every shape was a place they had passed, a bridge, a flood year, a woman who sold eels at Hythe. Nell had never believed him. Now, with the lock keeper shouting from the lip of the chamber and the barge drifting toward the reeds, she counted the hexagons along the rail and found she could not remember which one was the flood.

She hauled the tiller over and the Hesper swung, slow and grudging, into the mouth of the lock. Ropes went across. Tomasz, the keeper's boy who had grown up two bends downriver, caught the bow line on his shoulder and grinned at her through the spray. The gate groaned, shifted an inch, and the water began to fall away beneath them.

Later, when the boat was tied at the next moorings and the kettle had been on twice, Nell took the old logbook down from its shelf. On the last page her grandfather had drawn one more hexagon, unshaded, with a single word beside it in pencil: Yours. She inked it in black before she went to bed, and the river kept its own counsel all night.