Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two clasped hands with the words YOU ARE ENOUGH above them, on the inner upper arm.

Clasped hands with 'You are enough' lettering

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two hands clasped together, one with dark painted nails, with the words YOU ARE ENOUGH set in a curved line above them. The hands are built from fine stippled dots and short hatched strokes, with dense shading in the folds and shadows. The design is done in black ink only and sits centred on a pale upper arm against a striped sweater sleeve and a plain light wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Hollin Cross the last train came in after the lamps were lit, and old Tobias Reeve, who kept the signal box, always waited with his hand on the lever until the carriage doors had opened. He had done this for thirty-one years. Nobody asked him why, and he did not say.

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One November a girl stepped off the 9.40 with one case and no ticket. She had painted her nails black the night before, she said, because her mother always did it on feast days and she had not the heart to stop. She asked which way was the road to the mill. Tobias told her the road was shut for the bridge works, and that she could sit in the waiting room by the stove until the morning bus. She sat with her hands knotted in her lap and would not take the tea he offered.

At two o'clock she was still there, so he went back with his flask and found her standing at the platform edge, one hand stretched towards the empty rails. Another hand had closed round hers out of the dark, a plain one, rough from coal and cold. Neither of them was standing on the platform. Tobias said nothing. He only lifted his lamp so she could see the track, and the two hands held on while the lamp swung.

By morning the girl was gone and the bench was warm. On the whitewashed wall of the waiting room someone had scratched a curved line of words above two clasped hands: you are enough. Tobias never painted over it. Each winter he traced it again with a nail, so that whoever sat there cold would know the words had been meant for them.

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