Palm of a hand with a single black Chinese character tattooed on each of four fingers, shown in a sepia photograph.

Chinese characters tattooed on four fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A sepia photograph of an open palm showing four fingers, each with one black Chinese character tattooed across the finger. The characters have bold, brush-like strokes and are set along the length of each finger, with the thumb folded in at the side. The monochrome sepia tone and soft patterned background give the image an even, muted look.

Lettering Hand Chinese character Finger Palm Hand Ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come in closer to the range, the lot of you, and mind the cat. She has been out after mice all afternoon and thinks the hearth is hers by right. Winter at Harrowdene was a counting season. Every ewe, every sack of meal, every frozen egg went into the book, but the book lived in the lean-to and the ink wouldn't run in that cold, so old Ada Crane kept the tally in her head and on her own two hands. She could tell you how many hens were roosting in the dark just by touching her fingertips together.

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The winter the snow shut the lane, a travelling man came up from the valley road with a cough and a case of brushes. He asked for a bed in the barn and offered to write something for the house. Ada gave him the cold end of the hay and a bowl of broth, and in the morning he took her right hand, turned it palm up, and painted a single stroke across the first finger. 'One,' he said, 'the cow that didn't die.' Then he went up the hand, one mark to each finger, slow and careful, as though he were reckoning a long sum he had only half remembered.

The ink would not wash off. Not with lye, not with the hot water she used on the churn. Each night she counted the day upon her fingers, and each night the fourth mark seemed to ask her a question she could not answer. The schoolmaster's boy came up to read them and laughed. 'Numbers that have got above themselves,' he said, and would say no more.

When the thaw came, the lane ran with mud and the man was long gone down the valley. Ada went out to the top field and counted the new lambs against her knuckles. She got to the end of her hand and found the sum came out even at last, though she could not have said what the man had been counting.