Traditional style tattoo of two clasped hands with cuffs and a red rose with dark spiked leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clasped hands and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pair of clasped hands wearing ornate cuffs sits in front of a red rose with dark, spiky leaves radiating behind it. The design uses bold black outlines, solid fills and simple shading, with red, orange and yellow ink against grey-brown leaf tones. The motif is centred on a plain skin area against a dark grey background.

Traditional Forearm Hand Clasped hands Rose Leaves Cuff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dunstan Hale had not shaken a hand in eleven years, and he did not intend to start on a Tuesday in January with frost still lying in the furrows of the top field. Across the gate, Ada Pryor stood with her collar turned up and her gloves off, holding out a bare hand as if she had already paid for it.

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The quarrel was over a strip of hedgerow and a ditch that had flooded twice since Michaelmas. Ada's father had planted a red rose climber against the stone wall the year before he died, and it had crept over onto Dunstan's side, its thorns catching at his sleeves every time he hauled hay past. Now the rose was bare, just dark canes and a few hard hips, and he could see why she had come out in the cold to talk about it.

'Your cattle have been at my turnips,' she said. 'And your boundary stone has moved.' He told her that her father had moved it. She said her father had been dead long enough to be blamed for most things, and then she laughed, a short bark that surprised them both, and the laugh did what the words had not. He pulled off his left glove with his teeth.

Their hands met over the top bar, cold and rough, and neither let go quickly. When he finally walked back up the lane, the frost had already begun to fur the gatepost where her thumb had rested. Behind him the rose kept its thorns, and he left them where they were.