Black and grey sketched tattoo of a finger bone running along the back of a hand and index finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Finger bone tattoo on the hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests palm down on a wooden table, with a single finger bone tattooed along the back of the index finger and across the hand. The bone is drawn with dark outlines and fine hatched shading that gives it a sketched, anatomical look. The tattoo is in black ink only, set against pale skin and a dark wood surface.

Hand Bone Skeleton Hand

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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

The drawer in the Hartley Street store was labelled in the illustrator's neat capitals: DIGIT, LEFT INDEX, PROXIMAL, UNKNOWN DONOR. Nobody had opened it since the medical school moved out in 1971. I had the key only because the porter before me died with it still on his belt, and so on a wet Tuesday the inventory fell to me.

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Inside, wrapped in brown tissue gone soft as cloth, was a single finger bone. It was no model. The ends were worn smooth and the colour of old piano keys. Beside it lay a sheet of cartridge paper with the same bone drawn in ink, hatched so finely that it seemed to lift off the page, as if it had been set down on a table for a lesson. In the corner, in the same capitals, were a date and the words: for Mrs Adair, who asked to keep the shape.

The ledger had no Mrs Adair, but the bindery down the road did. Her name turned up in a 1948 wages book beside a line that said only, left hand, press. She had lost the finger in a machine, and the department had let her have a drawing of what remained, because she could not bear to think the shape of it would be forgotten. She had wanted the bone itself, too, and nobody had had the heart to refuse.

I put the bone back in its tissue and closed the drawer. Then I took the drawing home in my coat pocket, and all that evening I kept running my thumb along the line of the knuckle, the way you might test a stair you have been told is loose.