Black dotwork stipple drawing of a hand with the index and middle fingers crossed, shown on a pale grey textured background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed fingers hand in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A single hand is drawn with the index and middle fingers crossed over each other, while the other fingers are curled into the palm. The shading is built entirely from dense black dots, which give the skin its volume and the knuckles and creases their depth. The hand sits centrally on a pale grey, speckled background with no colour in the image.

Dotwork Hand Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind you, the sea does not care what you promise it, so my grandmother kept her fingers crossed through every crossing of the Minch, and she never once said why out loud. Back then the mail boat ran from Oban with a hold full of salt cod and a wheelhouse that smelled of paraffin. One October, a lad from Tobermory named Alasdair Cunningham stood at the rail with a letter in his oilskin, and he kept pressing his thumb against the envelope the way a man checks a pocket for his purse.

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He had asked a girl in Stornoway to wait for him. Two winters he had been gone, working the trawlers out of Hull, and the letter said she had changed her mind. He was not reading it again, he told my grandmother, because he knew every word. What he wanted was a bargain. If the boat came in before dark, he would forgive her. If it did not, he would forgive nothing and go down to Mull on the next ferry.

He crossed his first two fingers, the way children do when they swear they have not touched the biscuits, and the wind dropped as if someone had closed a door. The boat came in with the lamps still lit. Alasdair walked up the pier, and the girl was there, holding a lantern and laughing at him for the cross on his hand.

What he never told anyone was that the bargain had been a lie from the start. He had already torn up the letter over Hull. The crossed fingers were only to keep the sea from knowing how much he wanted to be let off the hook.