Two elderly hands clasped together in sepia tones, with small black crosses, star-like marks and fine lines tattooed across the knuckles, fingers and back of the hands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crosses and marks on elderly hands

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two aged hands are pressed together against a dark background, shown in a warm sepia tone. The backs of the hands and fingers carry small black tattoos, including crosses, a star-like mark, short bars and lines running along the fingers. On the right wrist, a cluster of looped linework forms a floral or knot-like motif, and the image is framed tightly on the hands.

Hand Hand Cross Star Line Flower Finger Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the bees and the ledger at Saint Oda's, and when the snow closed the pass he kept the count of the dead. Every winter the infirmary took in strangers off the road, and every spring the abbot asked how many had gone under the snow and how many had walked out again. Anselm wrote the names in the ledger, but the names were not enough for him, so he marked them on the back of his own hand with a needle and soot ink, one small cross for each soul he had sat with at the end.

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By the third winter his fingers were crowded with them. He drew a short bar for each child, a star for the miller's wife who sang while she died, a knot where the two brothers from the valley had come in together and left together, one hand on the other's shoulder. The novices began to murmur that he was counting his own place in heaven, and the abbot told them to hush.

Then came the winter of the great cold, when the bell rang every hour and no one came up the pass at all. On the last night of the year a knock sounded at the gate, and Anselm went down with the lamp. There was no one there, only a line of small black prints in the snow, leading away towards the chapel, each one the size of a child's palm.

He stood a long while in the cold. Then he went back to the ledger and, for the first time, wrote nothing at all.