Black and white photo of a fine line tattoo of beaded chains with droplet pendants draping from the inner wrist onto the palm of a hand.

Fine line beaded chain drape on the wrist

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is shown palm side up with a fine line tattoo of several strands of beaded chain hanging in curves from the inner wrist towards the base of the palm. Each strand has small open links or beads and tiny teardrop pendants that taper toward the lower edge of the design. The image is black and grey, with soft natural lighting and a dark, blurred background that keeps focus on the linework.

Fine line Hand Chain Bead Droplet Jewellery

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last chain I strung for the Halloran Brothers went up the night the big top leaked. Mother Ines sent me up the ladder with a spool of beading wire and a bag of jet drops, and I was to rig the drapes over the aerial frame before the matinee, because nobody else in the company could tie a knot that would hold a woman forty feet above the sawdust.

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Money had gone the way of the elephants. We had three acts left and a lion called Dutch who slept through everything. The beads were the one thing still shining. Ines wanted each strand to hang at a different length so the light would catch them in turns, the way a wet tram window does when another tram passes. I counted links under my breath to keep my hands steady: nine to the first droplet, eleven to the second, and the third strand so thin it looked like a sewing thread someone had forgotten to pull.

On the night of the storm the rig snapped its guy line and the whole tent sagged like a wet sheet. The drapes held. Ines came out from under the canvas with grit in her hair, looked up at the swinging strands, and said nothing for so long I thought I had tied them wrong. Then she laughed and said the brothers had sold tickets on the strength of a shine for thirty years, and a shine was all anyone had ever really bought.

We closed in Lewes a month later. I still keep the offcut in my biscuit tin, a loop of seven beads ending in one teardrop. When the kitchen lamp catches it, I think of the tent coming down around us that autumn, and how the last thing standing was the chain.