Black and grey forearm tattoo of a dagger held by two hands, with peony flowers and the words Hands Remember, in a traditional engraved style.

Dagger, hands and peonies on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dagger with a twisted hilt is gripped by two hands, one above and one below, with the blade running down the centre of the design. Peony flowers sit either side of the hands, and a further cluster of flowers sits beneath the words HANDS REMEMBER in plain capitals. The linework is bold and solid with stippled shading, rendered entirely in black and grey against the skin, with a blurred dark background behind the arm.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Dagger Hand Peony Flower Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't lift it off the wheel yet, lad. Hold it the way my father held it, thumb along the spine, fingers round the twist of the hilt like you're shaking hands with someone you don't trust. There. Now you can feel where the weight sits. Mind the sparks. They go into the cotton first and then they go into you.

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He ground knives for forty years on Dunn Street, and this one came to him from a man who'd taken it off a soldier in the last war, the hilt wound with brass wire gone green at the edges. My father never sold it. He said a blade remembers who has sharpened it and who has held it, and there was nothing he could do about it remembering him. When my mother was ill he took it down every evening and ground nothing at all. He just drew the stone along the edge, two hands on the grip, one above the other, as if the blade might wander off if he let go.

The week after the funeral I went to lift it and my hands would not let go either. The grip had set into them the way his had. Mother's peonies were already dropping on the back step, the big pink ones she'd planted the year I was born, so I cut a few and laid them on the bench beside the wheel because I could not think what else to do with them.

Hands remember, he used to say, and I took it for the sort of thing you say about pianos. Now I'm the one with the stone. Give it here. Your grip's wrong. Let me show you.