Hand with red nails resting on ripped jeans, showing fine line chevron and bar tattoos on the fingers and black lettering tattoo on the thigh.

Finger line tattoos and lettering on thigh

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with red nails rests on ripped dark denim, showing small tattoos on the fingers: a chevron on the middle finger, with short straight bars and dots on the neighbouring fingers. Partial black lettering, reading as ever regret and a word ending in ontrollably, runs across the thigh at the lower left. The linework is thin and crisp, the ink is dark grey-black, and the close crop focuses on the hand.

Fine line Lettering Hand Thigh Chevron Line Dot Bar Lettering Word

Find an artist for this

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 relay ship Mercy's Margin has drifted past the Kessler belt for eleven years, and you are the only one awake when the signal comes in on the third watch. It is three short pulses and a gap, then three more. Your grandmother taught you that rhythm by torchlight in the cargo hold, tapping it on a ration tin until you could hum it in your sleep.

Keep reading

You log it on the slate the way the crew always has, with marks you learned before you could write your name. A point with two arms is a sealed hatch. A bar is a day spent waiting. A dot is someone who went out on a tether and did not come back. The slate froze two winters ago when the coolant leaked, so your fingers keep the count now, and by the time the decoder finishes its work your hand has already ticked off eleven bars.

The message is from Tollen Reach, a salvage crew who went down into the wreck of a grain freighter. Most of it is damaged, but the lock on their hab still cycles and they cannot stop it, the words broken where the static bit: the door keeps opening and closing ...ontrollably. At the foot of the page, in a hand that must have been shaking, is a line you read three times before you understand it: we will never regret coming. Someone has already scratched out the rest.

You could leave it. The Margin has no fuel to spare and the reach is a week's burn out of your course. You press your thumb to the seventh bar on your finger, the one for the day your mother said she would come back, and then you key the reply into the transmitter: Hold the hatch. Count the pulses. We are turning around.