Black and grey shaded tattoo of a fingernail on the tip of a finger, shown in two side-by-side photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fingernail tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two photographs of the same finger, one close up and one from a wider angle. A dome-shaped fingernail is outlined in black and filled with grey shading, with faint vertical lines suggesting the nail's texture. The background is a red top and light fabric, and the tattoo sits against smooth skin with some faint marks above it.

Hand Nail Finger

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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 gate had taken the nail off Ivor Tapp's middle finger in January, and by February he was insisting it was the cold that had done it, not the gate, because a gate could be argued with and the cold could not. Doreen Lusk, who kept bees at the top of the lane and had steady hands from forty years of mending feed sacks, said she would draw it back on if he sat still and stopped calling the collie Pudding in front of the vet.

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She did it at the kitchen table with a fine nib and the bottle of black ink she used for labelling jam. First the outline, a dome that wanted to be a little too tall, then the grey shading in short upward strokes so it would pass for the ridges a real nail grows. Ivor watched the lamp instead of the nib. Outside the ewes were breathing steam over the top wall, and Pudding lay under the table with her chin on his boot.

He wore the finger to the Christmas show at the Grange, where the judges were a retired vet called Alan Brisk and his sister, who had opinions about everything. Brisk held the hand under the hall lights for a long time. "Good work, Doreen," he said at last. "Only it's too honest about being a drawing."

Ivor took the hand back and looked at it as if it had let him down personally. Then he went out to the car park, where the rain had started, and used the finger to scrape the frost off the windscreen. It did the job well enough. Nobody had ever asked a nail to do more than that.