Black dotwork tattoo of two clasped hands with long nails on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clasped hands on the inner wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two hands clasping one another, with one hand's long, pointed nails visible at the lower left. The design is built from stippled dots for shading, with fine outlines defining the fingers and knuckles. The ink is solid black and grey on pale skin, and the tattoo sits centrally on the inner wrist against a dark background.

Dotwork Forearm Hand Clasped hands Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Michaelmas fair set up on the water meadow outside Ledbury, and on the last cart to arrive came a woman whose nails were so long she could not close her fingers flat. The showmen called her Mother Sallow. She sold nothing but handshakes, a penny a grip, and she said whoever took her hand would know exactly what they owed.

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Tom Carrow had lost his father's mare at cards, and he came to the cart at dusk with a penny in his fist. She did not take the coin. She laid her clawed hand over his and asked him to close his fingers. He did, and the cold of her palm climbed his wrist like river water. "Your debt is paid," she said, "by the one who holds on longest."

He lay awake on that. In the morning the men he owed came up the lane, and his sister Nell stepped in front of him and took his hand in both of hers, gripping until her knuckles went white. The men laughed at first. Then they stopped laughing, because the grip would not be broken, and they went away muttering about witches and fair-ground tricks. By noon Nell's hands still would not open.

Tom walked back to the meadow with the mare's bridle over his shoulder. The cart was gone. There was only a ring of flattened grass and one penny in the mud, bright as a new moon. He pressed it into his sister's palm, and at last her fingers loosened, warm and ordinary again, and she asked him what on earth he had been doing with a bridle in the rain.