Black line tattoo of a hand with crossed index and middle fingers, in fine line style, on the lower leg above an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed fingers outline on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a hand with the index and middle fingers crossed, drawn as a single black outline with no shading. The linework is thin and even, and the nails are filled in with solid black. The design sits on the front of the lower leg just above the ankle, above a red sock and a black shoe, with plain cream walls behind.

Fine line Ankle Hand Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still and mind the tiller, because I'm not telling this twice and the lock won't wait for either of us. You want to know why Ned Pike never carried coal past Hatherby again? I'll tell you what he did with his hand, for that's where it started.

Keep reading

It was a wet March, the Wey running brown and high, and Ned had a load of slate due at the mill by Friday or the miller would sell the contract to a Dutchman with a bigger boat. The lock-keeper, Agnes Fell, had a sour look and a ledger she would not open for anyone who hadn't paid. Ned stood on her step with his cap in his fists and swore on his mother's grave that the dues were in the bow locker and he'd fetch them by dusk. Behind his back, down by his thigh, two fingers of his right hand were crossed hard enough to ache.

Agnes let him through. Every boatman tried that trick on her, and she knew a crossed finger meant a lie. Ned came back at dusk with no money, sheepish and damp, and said he'd only been fooling himself.

Here is the bit you'll not believe. The dues were never in the locker. Ned had to row back up the reach through the night and dig the purse out of the mud where he'd dropped it the summer before. Every stroke he cursed that crossed finger, and every stroke it stayed crossed, and by morning the cold had set it like a knot. He never uncrossed it again. Folk at Hatherby still say he went to his grave with two fingers wrapped around each other like a pair of old lovers.

So when a young man tells you he'll pay you Friday, you look at his hands, lad. Not his face. His hands.