Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two hands clasping, one plain and one covered in scales with an eye, with a dotted arc and three drips below, on the outer arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clasped hands with a scaled arm in dotwork

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A handshake tattoo in which one plain hand, with a cuff at the wrist, grips a hand whose arm is patterned with scales and an eye. A dotted arc sits above the joined hands and three solid drips hang below them. The shading is built from stippled dots and bold solid black lines on pale skin, with the composition centred and sharply defined.

Dotwork Blackwork Other Hand Eye Scale Snake Drip Cuff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the pawn hatch had stopped at ten to three, so I knew the man at the counter kept his own time. He slid a ledger across the glass with one bare hand. His other arm was sleeved in a dark cuff, and when the lamp caught it, I saw a pattern of scales running up beneath the skin, with a single lidded eye open near the wrist as though it had been watching the shop all night.

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"Your father's debt stands at three hundred pounds," he said, "and it can close tonight for one handshake. Refuse, and I'll wait under the arch on Pike Lane until the rain stops, which in this city means never." Outside, the streetlamp over the river wore a faint ring of dots, the way lamps do when the fog is thick enough to hold them. I thought of my father's hands, which had always shaken when he counted change, and of the rent due on Monday.

I took the hand. It was cool and dry, like a glove left on a radiator, and it held me firmly, the way a man holds a rope he does not intend to let go of. Above us, water gathered on the ceiling plaster and fell in three slow drops onto the open page. Each drop spread into a black stain, and where they landed, the ink of my father's name dissolved and ran.

In the morning the hatch was open and the shutter was up. The ledger lay on the counter, blank except for my own name written neatly at the bottom, and three small blots beneath it where the rain had come through, though the roof above was dry.