Realistic tattoo of two clasped hands, one wrapped in bandage, shaded in grey with red accents on the forearm.

Clasped hands on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are clasped together, with one hand wrapped in layers of bandage or cloth that overlap its fingers. The shading is soft and detailed, with strong contrast in the folds and shadows, and thin red lines sit along the edges and contours. The design fills the length of the forearm, with the hands running diagonally across the frame.

Realism Forearm Hand Clasped hands

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the reunion knew Mabel Quarry until she pulled off her gloves, and then it was her hands they remembered. The winter the mill pond froze, she had gone out after her brother's kite and come back with her fingers grey and stiff. Her mother bound them in strips of old linen, and the linen stayed on for forty years, wound tight from wrist to knuckle, so the village decided it was a penance for something, though nobody could say what.

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She sat across from Tom Harrow at the long trestle in the church hall and waited for the urn to be filled. He had grown heavy and kind, and he did not look at the wrapping. Instead he reached over the oilcloth and took her bare hand in his, the one that had been spared, and held it the way a man holds something he has been told to carry carefully.

"You kept the rope," she said. "You kept the knot," he said, and she laughed for the first time that evening. They had been eleven and twelve, tied together by a length of washing line across the ice, and it had been Tom who lay flat and reached while she went under to the shoulders. Neither of them had let go, and neither had told the grown-ups how long it had taken.

She unwound the linen there, slowly, one strip at a time, and folded each on the oilcloth like a letter she meant to keep. Underneath, her fingers were thin and pale and entirely ordinary. Tom did not let go. Behind them the urn began to tick and sing, and the room, which had been loud, went quiet enough to hear the cloth settle.