Palm of a hand under UV light with four small glowing outline symbols on the fingers: a triangle with a circle and line, an anchor, a heart and a circular emblem.

Four glowing symbols on fingers under UV light

Hand · Colour · Photo

A hand is photographed palm side against a dark background, with four simple outline symbols on the fingers that glow under ultraviolet light. The symbols are a triangle with a circle and vertical line, an anchor, a heart and a circular emblem with a crown-like shape inside. The linework is uniform and the glow appears green, red, orange and yellow, so the image reads as colour ink.

Hand Deathly hallows Anchor Heart Emblem Uv ink Finger

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 ghost train at Saltergate had been dark since August, and Mr Pryce wanted it lit for the last weekend of the season, so I was up a ladder at midnight with a tin of luminous paint and a cup of tea going cold on the rail. He had sent me the designs on the back of a postcard: a triangle with a circle and a line through it, an anchor for the pier, a heart for his wife, and a crowned badge copied from the steam organ. 'Make them sing under the blacklight,' he said, 'the way they did in my father's day.'

Keep reading

I painted the triangle first, on the board above the tunnel mouth where the first skeleton swings down. The paint drank the ultraviolet lamp and gave back a green so cold it looked like cut ice. The anchor went over the water tank in orange, because Pryce said the boats had brought the money in and the boats were what he missed. The heart I did in red for the queue at the doors, and the crowned emblem I gave yellow, following the dent in the organ's brass that a dropped barrel had left in 1961.

On the last night the lamps went up and the queue was three people long: a courting couple, a boy with a torch, and a woman who asked me to kill the lights so she could see the symbols properly. She stood in the dark with her lips moving, and when I asked what she was reading she said the names of the boats her father had crewed out of Saltergate before the harbour silted up. Then she bought four tickets, all for the same car, and rode through alone with the little suns burning over her head.

When the car came round again the attendant found the seat empty and the tickets gone, and under the blacklight every symbol I had painted glowed brighter than I had ever managed, as though the paint had been waiting for someone to read it aloud.