Black and grey crossed fingers tattoo in an engraved, hatched style on the upper arm, with a floral tattoo visible on the forearm below.

Crossed fingers on the upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a hand with the index and middle fingers crossed over each other, drawn in fine black outlines. Shading uses dense parallel hatching and cross-hatching across the knuckles, palm and fingers to create form. The design is entirely black and grey and sits centrally on the upper arm against a plain, softly blurred background.

Upper arm Hand Hatching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hull groaned against the quay like an old dog wanting its walk, and Ruth Garvie stood on the wet planks with her hands jammed in her oilskin pockets, counting the boats that hadn't come back. Three of them, Dougal said, and the Mary Lind was the last. Her father's boat. He had gone out on Tuesday with a cough he refused to see a doctor about, and the weather had turned on Wednesday like a cheap coat.

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The men on the slip didn't talk about it. They mended creels and drank tea from a flask that tasted of tin. Ruth went to the net loft, where the light came grey through salt-blind windows, and sat on an upturned crate beside Isobel Pirie, the skipper's wife, who was knitting something orange that might have been a hat. Isobel never looked up. 'Your father crossed his fingers every time he left this harbour,' she said. 'Thought I didn't see. Thirty-one years.'

Ruth looked down at her own hands, at the thumbs she chewed and the nails bitten to the quick since she was nine. She crossed two fingers on her knee, the index over the middle, and felt foolish, like a child at a school gate. Then she thought of her father's dry cough and the way he had pressed a sixpence into her palm before leaving, and she held the pose until her knuckles ached.

At four the horn sounded from the point. Ruth was on the quay before the first hull rounded the breakwater, and there was the Mary Lind, low in the water, her skipper lifting one arm over the rail. Ruth uncrossed her fingers slowly, one at a time, and found they had left a pale line on her skin. She kept them crossed a moment longer anyway, just in case.